ABSTRACT
Orientation implies a sense of location, an awareness of position in relation to our immediate or more remote surroundings. Any creature that is able to move about within its environment will have a need for some form of spatial orientation. The sense of awareness of people's surroundings that people call orientation is closely associated with an ability to navigate within that environment. Experiments in which visual landmarks on the periphery of a circular enclosure were rotated to a new location showed a corresponding change in the location of firing of place cells. Spatial disorientation is concerned with the way in which the flight environment can deceive a pilot, either because the visual environment is degraded or obscured, or because the force environment is altered by the dynamics of the aircraft. The cross-coupled illusion is easily provoked in the laboratory or even in a rotating office chair, and it is regularly demonstrated to aircrew in rotating spatial disorientation trainer devices.
