Where does orientation collide?

In spatial cognition, orientation is knowing your own position and heading within the space around you, and updating that estimate as you move. The brain builds this sense from vision, from the vestibular signals of the inner ear that register head rotation and gravity, and from self-motion cues, and it stores the layout of a familiar place as a cognitive map. Epstein and colleagues' 2017 review The cognitive map in humans describes how the hippocampus and neighbouring regions support this map and the navigation that depends on it. The same word appears in clinical practice, where a patient judged alert and 'oriented times three' knows person, place, and time. The referent here is a living sense of where a body sits and faces in real space, not a value someone holds, a crystal's alignment, or an animal's compass.[1]

Unit

A body's sensed position and heading in real space

Recovery means

Reorientation, as when a lost person re-establishes their heading from a landmark or a map

Measured by

Assessed by navigation and pointing tasks, path-integration errors, and clinical orientation questions

In social and personality psychology, an orientation is a stable disposition that tilts a person toward certain values, goals, or ways of responding. The suffix is unusually productive: the literature carries goal orientation, future orientation, regulatory orientation, sexual orientation, and social value orientation, among many others, each naming a different standing tendency. Social value orientation, for one, is the weight a person gives to their own outcomes against others' when the two are in tension, and Murphy, Ackermann, and Handgraaf's 2011 Measuring social value orientation sets out a graded way to place people along that continuum. Sexual orientation, in the same grammatical family, is used in this research as a construct describing a person's enduring pattern of attraction. What ties these together is only the word: each 'X orientation' points to its own trait and its own measure, and the shared label is a naming habit, not a shared mechanism.[2]

Unit

A person's standing on a given value or goal continuum

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed by self-report scales and choice tasks, such as the graded social value orientation measure

In crystallography and materials science, orientation is the angular alignment of a crystal lattice relative to a fixed frame, such as the axes of a sample or a rolling direction. When the grains in a metal, rock, or ceramic are not aligned at random but cluster around preferred directions, the material has a texture, or preferred orientation, and this alignment makes properties like strength and conductivity depend on direction. Wenk and Van Houtte's 2004 review Texture and anisotropy sets out how such orientations are measured and modelled across metals and rocks. Geologists use the same idea at the outcrop scale, recording the strike and dip that fix the orientation of a rock layer or a fault plane in space. The referent is a measured angle between a structure and a reference frame, reported in degrees, and it has nothing to do with a person's position, a value they hold, or an animal's heading.[3]

Unit

An angle between a lattice or structure and a reference frame, in degrees

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Measured by X-ray or electron diffraction and pole figures for crystals, and by compass strike and dip in the field

In sensory biology, orientation is the process by which an animal sets and holds a heading while moving or migrating. Birds and other animals draw on several compasses for this, including a sun compass that corrects for the time of day and a magnetic compass that reads the Earth's field, the sense known as magnetoreception. Wiltschko and Wiltschko's 1972 experiments Magnetic compass of European robins showed that caged migratory robins take their direction from the field's inclination, and their 2005 review surveys how such magnetic orientation works across species. Earlier work by Gustav Kramer had established the sun compass in birds, using caged birds that kept a direction by the sun. The referent is an animal's directed heading and the sensory machinery behind it, not a body's felt position, a lattice angle, or a personality trait.[4][5]

Unit

An animal's chosen compass heading

Recovery means

Reorientation, as when a displaced or clock-shifted animal resets its heading from an available compass

Measured by

Inferred from directed movement in orientation cages and from displacement or tracking experiments