Landmark Sequence Learning from Real-World Route Navigation and the Impact of Navigation Aid Visualisation Style

Primacy and recency features of serial memory are a hallmark of typical memory functions that have been observed for a wide array of tasks. Recently, the ubiquity of this serial position effect has been supported for objects learned during navigation, with canonical serial position functions observed for sequence memory of landmarks that were encountered along a route during a highly controlled virtual navigation task. In the present study, we extended those findings to a real-world navigation task in which participants actively walked a route through a city whilst using a navigation aid featuring either realistic or abstract landmark visualisation styles. Analyses of serial position functions (i.e., absolute sequence knowledge) and sequence lags (i.e., relative sequence knowledge) yielded similar profiles to those observed in a lab based virtual navigation task from previous work and non-spatial list learning studies. There were strong primacy effects for serial position memory in both conditions; recency effects only in the realistic visualisation condition; a non-uniform distribution of item-lags peaking at lag +1; and an overall bias towards positive lags for both visualisation conditions. The findings demonstrate that benchmark serial position memory effects can be observed in uncontrolled, real-world behaviour. In a navigation context, the results support the notion that general memory mechanisms are involved in spatial learning, and that landmark sequence knowledge is a feature of spatial knowledge which is affected by navigation aids

Cognitive Principles of Schematisation for Wayfinding Assistance

People often need assistance to successfully perform wayfinding tasks in unfamiliar environments. Nowadays, a huge variety of wayfinding assistance systems exists. All these systems intend to present the needed information for a certain wayfinding situation in an adequate presentation. Some wayfinding assistance systems utilize findings for the field of cognitive sciences to develop and design cognitive ergonomic approaches. These approaches aim to be systems with which the users can effortless interact with and which present needed information in a way the user can acquire the information naturally. Therefore it is necessary to determinate the information needs of the user in a certain wayfinding task and to investigate how this information is processed and conceptualised by the wayfinder to be able to present it adequately. Cognitive motivated schematic maps are an example which employ this knowledge and emphasise relevant information and present it in an easily readable way. In my thesis I present a transfer approach to reuse the knowledge of well-grounded knowledge of schematisation techniques from one externalisation such as maps to another externalization such as virtual environments. A analysis of the informational need of the specific wayfinding task route following is done one the hand of a functional decomposition as well as a deep analysis of representation-theoretic consideration of the external representations maps and virtual environments. Concluding from these results, guidelines for transferring schematisation principles between different representation types are proposed. Specifically, this thesis chose the exemplary transfer of the schematisation technique wayfinding choremes from a map presentation into a virtual environment to present the theoretic requirements for a successful transfer. Wayfinding choremes are abstract mental concepts of turning action which are accessible as graphical externalisation integrated into route maps. These wayfinding choremes maps emphasis the turning action along the route by displaying the angular information as prototypes of 45° or 90°. This schematisation technique enhances wayfinding performance by supporting the matching processes between the map representation and the internal mental representation of the user. I embed the concept of wayfinding choremes into a virtual environment and present a study to test if the transferred schematisation technique also enhance the wayfinding performance. The empirical investigations present a successful transfer of the concept of the wayfinding choremes. Depending on the complexity of the route the embedded schematization enhance the wayfinding performance of participants who try to follow a route from memory. Participants who trained and recall the route in a schematised virtual environment make fewer errors than the participants of the unmodified virtual world. This thesis sets an example of the close research circle of cognitive behavioural studies to representation-theoretical considerations to applications of wayfinding assistance and their evaluations back to new conclusions in cognitive science. It contributes an interdisciplinary comprehensive inspection of the interplay of environmental factors and mental processes on the example of angular information and mental distortion of this information

The impossible puzzle: No global embedding in environmental space memory

We live in compartmentalized, clustered environments and have to deal with spatial information scattered across rooms, streets, neighborhoods, and cities every day of our life. Yet, we are able to piece this information together in our head, for example, in order to find our way from our flat to our workplace, even when faced with construction work and blocked streets. Furthermore, we can point out the direction to the supermarket to a pedestrian without having direct visual access to it. My thesis is concerned with the question of how our memory for spatial relations of places in navigable space (also called survey knowledge) is actually structured. In four consecutive studies, I contrasted two major theo-retical approaches that try to explain how we represent survey knowledge, namely, Euclidean map and enriched graph approaches. Euclidean map approaches assume that spatial locations are represented in a map-like, globally embedded, Euclidean format. Enriched graph approaches propose a partitioned, unitwise representation of places connected in a network. These local units are not required to be globally consistent. In each study, I used different virtual environments, sometimes single rooms, mostly navigable multi-corridor environ-ments, once even an impossible non-Euclidean environment. Participants learned spatial relations between objects spread across these environments and solved survey tasks afterward (e.g., pointing to object locations from memory). Their performance yielded multiple effects. In short, the most prominent effects were: (1) Pointing latency increased with increasing number of places along the route towards the target, (2) facilitated recall along the direction of the initially experienced path walked within the environment, (3) globally incoherent point-ing behavior following the local metrics experienced from place to place, (4) facilitated performance upon alignment with local corridor geometry but also (5) upon alignment with regional geometry and a global main orientation, and (6) decreased pointing latency when pointing beyond regional boundaries. Interpreting these effects jointly implies that human survey knowledge is not repre-sented in the form of a Euclidean mental map embedding all encountered places in a uniform, globally consistent format. Instead, just as the environment we experience, also our memory of it seems to be compartmentalized, consisting of a network of local places connected by directed links that specify how to get from one place to another (rotation and translation) without directly requiring a global calibration. Survey estimates have to be constructed incrementally following this graph structure along the memorized connectivity, thereby relying on the local metrics that enrich the graph entities. These estimates are generally transient but can be retained for a limited amount of time for aiding subsequent estimates. In addition to the local entities of the enriched graph representation, it seems that general reference directions can be acquired during learning a navigable multi-compartment space. Such a reference direction can be understood as a mental “north”, a main direction that is tried to be main-tained and propagated across multiple local places and represented supplemen-tary in memory. It might be limited to only a sub-group of local units, thereby forming regional clusters, or it can cover the entire environment that was encountered. Such a general reference direction can aid the coordination of the local memory units during the construction of survey estimates, however, it does not require a global embedding of all place information into a coherent Euclidean map format. In sum, our representation of navigable space seems to be best described as an impossible puzzle where the memorized pieces and connec-tions do not necessarily match up on a global scale

Situated interaction on spatial topics

In this thesis, we present a model and an implementation to handle situational interactions on spatial topics as well as several adaptation strategies to cope with common problems in real-world applications. The model is designed to incorporate situational factors in spatial reasoning processes at the basic level and to facilitate its use in a wide range of applications. The implementation realizing the model corresponds very closely to the structure of the model, and was put to test in a scenario of a mobile tourist guide. The adaptation strategies address the lack of information, resource restrictions as well as the problem of varying availability and quality of positional information.In dieser Arbeit stellen wir ein Modell zur Verarbeitung situierter Interaktionen über raumbezogene Sachverhalte und seine Implementation vor. Außerdem präsentieren wir verschiedene Strategien zum Umgang mit häufigen Problemen, die im Zusammenhang mit dem (mobilen) Einsatz von Systemen im realen Umfeld auftreten. Das zu Grunde liegende Modell bezieht situationsbezogene Faktoren auf unterster Ebene mit ein und erleichtert durch den modularen Aufbau seinen Einsatz im Rahmen verschiedener Anwendungen. Die entsprechende Implementation spiegelt die Struktur des Modells wider und wurde im Rahmen eines mobilen Touristenführers getestet. Die ebenfalls vorgestellten Adaptionsstrategien dienen unter anderem zur Behandlung von Informationsmangel und von Ressourcenbeschränkungen sowie zum Umgang mit dem Problem variierender Verfügbarkeit und Qualität von Positionsinformation

The role of attention in spatial (dis)orientation of older adults.

Human ageing is accompanied by deficits in spatial navigation abilities. These changes are widespread and affect many components of the navigation system. Such changes have profound effects on an individual’s independence as their ability to learn and find their way through novel environments diminishes. Among the widespread age-related changes are declines in landmark-based place and route learning, which are the focus of this project. The work presented in this thesis seeks to enhance our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms which contribute to declining navigation ability, with a particular emphasis on attentional processes. Two place recognition experiments confirmed age-related deficits in overall place learning ability. These deficits were particularly pronounced when recognition depended on object- location binding mechanisms to encode the spatial arrangements of landmarks, as compared to recognition from object identity alone. Analyses of eye-tracking data revealed a specific visual encoding strategy which involved linking landmarks together through sequences of eye-movements. Importantly, the use of this strategy predicted place recognition performance. Older adults were less likely to use this encoding strategy than younger adults, reflecting a difference in the underlying visual attention mechanisms which aid place learning. These experiments also revealed that perspective taking mechanisms during place recognition were not affected by cognitive ageing. Four route navigation experiments demonstrated a persistent deficit in route learning and recall. Specifically, during learning older adults are slower at learning landmark-direction associations and the sequence in which places and landmarks are encountered. We found that after a route was learned successfully, which took longer for older adults, landmark- direction memory was similar between age groups, but the age-related deficit in landmark sequence knowledge remained. We suggest that this pattern of results can be explained by the prioritisation of limited attentional resources by older adults to acquire specific types of route knowledge at the expense of others. Additional analyses showed that memory for sequences of landmarks exhibited similar serial memory patterns to those found for other sequences, such as word lists, in both younger and older adults. Eye-tracking measures from one of the route navigation studies were related to navigation performance but did not differ between age groups. This finding suggests that unlike place learning, visual attention mechanisms do not contribute to age-related differences in route navigation ability. Consistent with this result, measures of attentional engagement in the same study also revealed similar regulation of attentional resources along different portions of a route for older and younger adults. Overall, the work presented in this thesis provides evidence of both intact and degraded mechanisms which contribute to navigation ability in older adults. Our findings show that regulation of attentional engagement, the control of overt visual attention during route learning, encoding of landmark identities, and perspective-taking mechanisms are similar between younger and older adults. In contrast, visual encoding strategies during place learning differ between age-groups, as does object-location binding mechanisms. Associating directions with landmarks during route learning does show age related slowing, which is overcome with several learning attempts. Age-related decline in landmark and place sequence learning remains impaired even after a route is learned. These results improve our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms which underlie navigation impairment in ageing humans, as well as shedding light on which cognitive mechanisms can still be relied upon for successful navigation

How did we get there? Supporting older adults’ spatial orientation within the built environment.

Older adults exhibit marked declines in navigation skills; these difficulties become worse if individuals are showing early signs of cognitive impairment, which often results in disorientation, particularly in unfamiliar environments. Many of these individuals eventually face the challenge of having to learn their way around new surroundings e.g. with potential increased visits to hospitals or when moving into retirement housing or care-home environments. This PhD thesis aims to develop a clearer understanding of older adults’ route learning and route knowledge when learning routes through built environments. To gain a more complete understanding of the experiences typical and early atypical ageing adults encounter, I adopted a mixed- methods approach. Chapters 3, 4 and 8 report on data following a quantitative experimental psychology approach to measure route learning and route knowledge in virtual and real environments, whilst Chapters 6 and 7 report on data using a qualitative approach to data collection and analysis to gain an understanding of the lived orientation experiences people living in and visiting retirement settings encounter. The findings from the data chapters are discussed in relation to existing theory and literature surrounding the effects that typical and early atypical ageing has on the abilities to learn and remember routes. In particular this thesis contributes towards the understanding of how typical and atypical ageing affects route learning and route knowledge, and how the findings can be applied to critically improve the suggestions made in dementia friendly design guidelines. The thesis concludes that simplistic VR environments do reliably capture real world navigation performance, but are additionally beneficial in that they detect the earliest symptoms of early atypical ageing more so than real world navigation. This can have benefits in detecting and diagnosing early atypical ageing in a clinical setting