Wayfinding in pairs: comparing the planning and navigation performance of dyads and individuals in a real-world environment.

Navigation is essential to life, and it is cognitively complex, drawing on abilities such as prospective and situated planning, spatial memory, location recognition, and real-time decision-making. In many cases, day-to-day navigation is embedded in a social context where cognition and behavior are shaped by others, but the great majority of existing research in spatial cognition has focused on individuals. The two studies we report here contribute to our understanding of social wayfinding, assessing the performance of paired and individual navigators on a real-world wayfinding task in which they were instructed to minimize time and distance traveled. In the first study, we recruited 30 pairs of friends (familiar dyads); in the second, we recruited 30 solo participants (individuals). We compare the two studies to the results of an earlier study of 30 pairs of strangers (unfamiliar dyads). We draw out differences in performance with respect to spatial, social, and cognitive considerations. Of the three conditions, solo participants were least successful in reaching the destination accurately on their initial attempt. Friends traveled more efficiently than either strangers or individuals. Working with a partner also appeared to lend confidence to wayfinders: dyads of either familiarity type were more persistent than individuals in the navigation task, even after encountering challenges or making incorrect attempts. Route selection was additionally impacted by route complexity and unfamiliarity with the study area. Navigators explicitly used ease of remembering as a planning criterion, and the resulting differences in route complexity likely influenced success during enacted navigation.

Wayfinding as a Social Activity.

We discuss the important, but greatly under-researched, topic of the social aspects of human wayfinding during navigation. Wayfinding represents the planning and decision-making component of navigation and is arguably among the most common, real-world domains of both individual and group-level decision making. We highlight the myriad ways that wayfinding by people is not a solitary psychological process but is influenced by the actions of other people, even by their mere presence. We also present a novel and comprehensive framework for classifying wayfinding in complex environments that incorporates the influence of other people. This classification builds upon the premises of previous wayfinding taxonomies and is further structured into four parts based upon (1) the nature of the interaction between the actors and (2) the time frame in which the interaction takes place. We highlight gaps in our current understanding of social wayfinding and outline future research opportunities.

How sense-of-direction and learning intentionality relate to spatial knowledge acquisition in the environment.

People's impression of their own "sense-of-direction" (SOD) is related to their ability to effectively find their way through environments, such as neighborhoods and cities, but is also related to the speed and accuracy with which they learn new environments. In the current literature, it is unclear whether the cognitive skills underlying SOD require intentional cognitive effort to produce accurate knowledge of a new environment. The cognitive skills underlying SOD could exert their influence automatically-without conscious intention-or they might need to be intentionally and effortfully applied. Determining the intentionality of acquiring environmental spatial knowledge would shed light on whether individuals with a poor SOD can be trained to use the skill set of an individual with good SOD, thereby improving their wayfinding and spatial learning. Therefore, this research investigates the accuracy of spatial knowledge acquisition during a walk through a previously unfamiliar neighborhood by individuals with differing levels of self-assessed SOD, as a function of whether their spatial learning was intentional or incidental. After walking a route through the neighborhood, participants completed landmark, route, and survey knowledge tasks. SOD was related to the accuracy of acquired spatial knowledge, as has been found previously. However, learning intentionality did not affect spatial knowledge acquisition, neither as a main effect nor in interaction with SOD. This research reveals that while the accuracy of spatial knowledge acquired via direct travel through an environment is validly measured by self-reported SOD, the spatial skills behind a good SOD appear to operate with or without intentional application.

Location memory for dots in polygons versus cities in regions: evaluating the category adjustment model.

We conducted 3 experiments to examine the category adjustment model (Huttenlocher, Hedges, & Duncan, 1991) in circumstances in which the category boundaries were irregular schematized polygons made from outlines of maps. For the first time, accuracy was tested when only perceptual and/or existing long-term memory information about identical locations was cued. Participants from Alberta, Canada and California received 1 of 3 conditions: dots-only, in which a dot appeared within the polygon, and after a 4-s dynamic mask the empty polygon appeared and the participant indicated where the dot had been; dots-and-names, in which participants were told that the first polygon represented Alberta/California and that each dot was in the correct location for the city whose name appeared outside the polygon; and names-only, in which there was no first polygon, and participants clicked on the city locations from extant memory alone. Location recall in the dots-only and dots-and-names conditions did not differ from each other and had small but significant directional errors that pointed away from the centroids of the polygons. In contrast, the names-only condition had large and significant directional errors that pointed toward the centroids. Experiments 2 and 3 eliminated the distribution of stimuli and overall screen position as causal factors. The data suggest that in the "classic" category adjustment paradigm, it is difficult to determine a priori when Bayesian cue combination is applicable, making Bayesian analysis less useful as a theoretical approach to location estimation.

Spatial reasoning with external visualizations: what matters is what you see, not whether you interact.

Three experiments examined the effects of interactive visualizations and spatial abilities on a task requiring participants to infer and draw cross sections of a three-dimensional (3D) object. The experiments manipulated whether participants could interactively control a virtual 3D visualization of the object while performing the task, and compared participants who were allowed interactive control of the visualization to those who were not allowed control. In Experiment 1, interactivity produced better performance than passive viewing, but the advantage of interactivity disappeared in Experiment 2 when visual input for the two conditions in a yoked design was equalized. In Experiments 2 and 3, differences in how interactive participants manipulated the visualization were large and related to performance. In Experiment 3, non-interactive participants who watched optimal movements of the display performed as well as interactive participants who manipulated the visualization effectively and better than interactive participants who manipulated the visualization ineffectively. Spatial ability made an independent contribution to performance on the spatial reasoning task, but did not predict patterns of interactive behavior. These experiments indicate that providing participants with active control of a computer visualization does not necessarily enhance task performance, whereas seeing the most task-relevant information does, and this is true regardless of whether the task-relevant information is obtained actively or passively.

Global-scale location and distance estimates: common representations and strategies in absolute and relative judgments.

The authors examined whether absolute and relative judgments about global-scale locations and distances were generated from common representations. At the end of a 10-week class on the regional geography of the United States, participants estimated the latitudes of 16 North American cities and all possible pairwise distances between them. Although participants were relative experts, their latitude estimates revealed the presence of psychologically based regions with large gaps between them and a tendency to stretch North America southward toward the equator. The distance estimates revealed the same properties in the representation recovered via multidimensional scaling. Though the aggregated within- and between-regions distance estimates were fitted by Stevens's law (S. S. Stevens, 1957), this was an averaging artifact: The appropriateness of a power function to describe distance estimates depended on the regional membership of the cities. The authors conclude that plausible reasoning strategies, combined with regionalized representations and beliefs about the location of these relative to global landmarks, underlie global-scale latitude and distance judgments.

Spatial knowledge acquisition from direct experience in the environment: individual differences in the development of metric knowledge and the integration of separately learned places.

Existing frameworks for explaining spatial knowledge acquisition in a new environment propose either stage-like or continuous development. To examine the spatial microgenesis of individuals, a longitudinal study was conducted. Twenty-four college students were individually driven along two routes in a previously unfamiliar neighborhood over 10 weekly sessions. Starting Session 4, they were also driven along a short connecting route. After each session, participants estimated spatial properties of the routes. Some participants' knowledge improved fairly continuously over the sessions, but most participants either manifested accurate metric knowledge from the first session or never manifested accurate metric knowledge. Results are discussed in light of these large individual differences, particularly with respect to the accuracy and development of integrated configurational knowledge.

Orientation specificity and spatial updating of memories for layouts.

This article examines the degree to which knowledge about the body's orientation affects transformations in spatial memory and whether memories are accessed with a preferred orientation. Participants learned large paths from a single viewpoint and were later asked to make judgments of relative directions from imagined positions on the path. Experiments 1 and 2 contribute to the emerging consensus that memories for large layouts are orientation specific, suggesting that prior findings to the contrary may not have fully accounted for latencies. Experiments 2 and 3 show that knowledge of one's orientation can create a preferred direction in spatial memory that is different from the learned orientation. Results further suggest that spatial updating may not be as automatic as previously thought.