Comparing written and photo-based indoor wayfinding instructions through eye fixation measures and user ratings as mental effort assessments

The use of mobile pedestrian wayfinding applications is gaining importance indoors. However, compared to outdoors, much less research has been conducted with respect to the most adequate ways to convey indoor wayfinding information to a user. An explorative study was conducted to compare two pedestrian indoor wayfinding applications, one text-based (Sole-Way) and one image-based (Eyedog), in terms of mental effort. To do this, eye tracking data and mental effort ratings were collected from 29 participants during two routes in an indoor environment. The results show that both textual instructions and photographs can enable a navigator to find his/her way while experiencing no or very little cognitive effort or difficulties. However, these instructions must be in line with a user's expectations of the route, which are based on his/her interpretation of the indoor environment at decision points. In this case, textual instructions offer the advantage that specific information can be explicitly and concisely shared with the user. Furthermore, the study drew attention to potential usability issues of the wayfinding aids (e.g. the incentive to swipe) and, as such, demonstrated the value of eye tracking and mental effort assessments in usability research

Walking and Walkability: Is Wayfinding a Missing Link? Implications for Public Health Practice

Research on walking and walkability has yet to focus on wayfinding, the interactive, problem-solving process by which people use environmental information to locate themselves and navigate through various settings

A systematic review of factors influencing signage salience in indoor environments

Wayfinding signage is an intermediary public facility that coordinates the relationship between space and people, and it is crucial to help people find their way in complex indoor environments. In people’s cognitive behaviour towards wayfinding signs, the visual salience of the signs is the prerequisite and key to ensuring their effective operation. This paper aims to review published research articles on the effect of indoor environments on the saliency of wayfinding signs. The literature review was conducted by PICO methodology to formulate the research question and develop search strategies. Relevant research articles were identified by systematically searching electronic databases, including Web of Science, ScienceDirect, ProQuest, and EBSCO. This paper summarises two categories of factors influencing signage salience: (1) floor plan factors and (2) environmental factors. This study examined and condensed the attributes of wayfinding signage and their impact on how pedestrians perceive visuals while navigating. Exploring the elements that influence the visual prominence of indoor signs enhances our comprehension of how pedestrians engage with visually guided information indoors. Furthermore, this offers a theoretical foundation for the realm of indoor wayfinding

J Phys Act Health

BackgroundResearch on walking and walkability has yet to focus on wayfinding, the interactive, problem-solving process by which people use environmental information to locate themselves and navigate through various settings.MethodsWe reviewed the literature on outdoor pedestrian-oriented wayfinding to examine its relationship to walking and walkability, 2 areas of importance to physical activity promotion.ResultsOur findings document that wayfinding is cognitively demanding and can compete with other functions, including walking itself. Moreover, features of the environment can either facilitate or impede wayfinding, just as environmental features can influence walking.ConclusionsAlthough there is still much to be learned about wayfinding and walking behaviors, our review helps frame the issues and lays out the importance of this area of research and practice.CC999999/Intramural CDC HHS/United States2017-08-31T00:00:00Z25965057PMC557841

DYNAMICS OF COLLABORATIVE NAVIGATION AND APPLYING DATA DRIVEN METHODS TO IMPROVE PEDESTRIAN NAVIGATION INSTRUCTIONS AT DECISION POINTS FOR PEOPLE OF VARYING SPATIAL APTITUDES

Cognitive Geography seeks to understand individual decision-making variations based on fundamental cognitive differences between people of varying spatial aptitudes. Understanding fundamental behavioral discrepancies among individuals is an important step to improve navigation algorithms and the overall travel experience. Contemporary navigation aids, although helpful in providing turn-by-turn directions, lack important capabilities to distinguish decision points for their features and importance. Existing systems lack the ability to generate landmark or decision point based instructions using real-time or crowd sourced data. Systems cannot customize personalized instructions for individuals based on inherent spatial ability, travel history, or situations. This dissertation presents a novel experimental setup to examine simultaneous wayfinding behavior for people of varying spatial abilities. This study reveals discrepancies in the information processing, landmark preference and spatial information communication among groups possessing differing abilities. Empirical data is used to validate computational salience techniques that endeavor to predict the difficulty of decision point use from the structure of the routes. Outlink score and outflux score, two meta-algorithms that derive secondary scores from existing metrics of network analysis, are explored. These two algorithms approximate human cognitive variation in navigation by analyzing neighboring and directional effect properties of decision point nodes within a routing network. The results are validated by a human wayfinding experiment, results show that these metrics generally improve the prediction of errors. In addition, a model of personalized weighting for users\u27 characteristics is derived from a SVMrank machine learning method. Such a system can effectively rank decision point difficulty based on user behavior and derive weighted models for navigators that reflect their individual tendencies. The weights reflect certain characteristics of groups. Such models can serve as personal travel profiles, and potentially be used to complement sense-of-direction surveys in classifying wayfinders. A prototype with augmented instructions for pedestrian navigation is created and tested, with particular focus on investigating how augmented instructions at particular decision points affect spatial learning. The results demonstrate that survey knowledge acquisition is improved for people with low spatial ability while decreased for people of high spatial ability. Finally, contributions are summarized, conclusions are provided, and future implications are discussed

Human spatial navigation in the digital era: Effects of landmark depiction on mobile maps on navigators’ spatial learning and brain activity during assisted navigation

Navigation was an essential survival skill for our ancestors and is still a fundamental activity in our everyday lives. To stay oriented and assist navigation, our ancestors had a long history of developing and employing physical maps that communicated an enormous amount of spatial and visual information about their surroundings. Today, in the digital era, we are increasingly turning to mobile navigation devices to ease daily navigation tasks, surrendering our spatial and navigational skills to the hand-held device. On the flip side, the conveniences of such devices lead us to pay less attention to our surroundings, make fewer spatial decisions, and remember less about the surroundings we have traversed. As navigational skills and spatial memory are related to adult neurogenesis, healthy aging, education, and survival, scientists and researchers from multidisciplinary fields have made calls to develop a new account of mobile navigation assistance to preserve human navigational abilities and spatial memory. Landmarks have been advocated for special attention in developing cognitively supportive navigation systems, as landmarks are widely accepted as key features to support spatial navigation and spatial learning of an environment. Turn-by-turn direction instructions without reference to surrounding landmarks, such as those provided by most existing navigation systems, can be one of the reasons for navigators’ spatial memory deterioration during assisted navigation. Despite the benefit of landmarks in navigation and spatial learning, long-standing literature on cognitive psychology has pointed out that individuals have only a limited cognitive capacity to process presented information for a task. When the learning items exceed learners’ capacity, the performance may reach a plateau or even drop. This leads to an unexamined yet important research question on how to visualize landmarks on a mobile map to optimize navigators’ cognitive resource exertion and thus optimize their spatial learning. To investigate this question, I leveraged neuropsychological and hypothesis-driven approaches and investigated whether and how different numbers of landmarks depicted on a mobile map affected navigators’ spatial learning, cognitive load, and visuospatial encoding. Specifically, I set out a navigation experiment in three virtual urban environments, in which participants were asked to follow a given route to a specific destination with the aid of a mobile map. Three different numbers of landmarks—3, 5, and 7—along the given route were selected based on cognitive capacity literature and presented to 48 participants during map-assisted navigation. Their brain activity was recorded both during the phase of map consultation and during that of active locomotion. After navigation in each virtual city, their spatial knowledge of the traversed routes was assessed. The statistical results revealed that spatial learning improved when a medium number of landmarks (i.e., five) was depicted on a mobile map compared to the lowest evaluated number (i.e., three) of landmarks, and there was no further improvement when the highest number (i.e., seven) of landmarks were provided on the mobile map. The neural correlates that were interpreted to reflect cognitive load during map consultation increased when participants were processing seven landmarks depicted on a mobile map compared to the other two landmark conditions; by contrast, the neural correlates that indicated visuospatial encoding increased with a higher number of presented landmarks. In line with the cognitive load changes during map consultation, cognitive load during active locomotion also increased when participants were in the seven-landmark condition, compared to the other two landmark conditions. This thesis provides an exemplary paradigm to investigate navigators’ behavior and cognitive processing during map-assisted navigation and to utilize neuropsychological approaches to solve cartographic design problems. The findings contribute to a better understanding of the effects of landmark depiction (3, 5, and 7 landmarks) on navigators’ spatial learning outcomes and their cognitive processing (cognitive load and visuospatial encoding) during map-assisted navigation. Of these insights, I conclude with two main takeaways for audiences including navigation researchers and navigation system designers. First, the thesis suggests a boundary effect of the proposed benefits of landmarks in spatial learning: providing landmarks on maps benefits users’ spatial learning only to a certain extent when the number of landmarks does not increase cognitive load. Medium number (i.e., 5) of landmarks seems to be the best option in the current experiment, as five landmarks facilitate spatial learning without taxing additional cognitive resources. The second takeaway is that the increased cognitive load during map use might also spill over into the locomotion phase through the environment; thus, the locomotion phase in the environment should also be carefully considered while designing a mobile map to support navigation and environmental learning

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

How does the design of landmarks on a mobile map influence wayfinding experts’ spatial learning during a real-world navigation task?

Humans increasingly rely on GPS-enabled mobile maps to navigate novel environments. However, this reliance can negatively affect spatial learning, which can be detrimental even for expert navigators such as search and rescue personnel. Landmark visualization has been shown to improve spatial learning in general populations by facilitating object identification between the map and the environment. How landmark visualization supports expert users’ spatial learning during map-assisted navigation is still an open research question. We thus conducted a real-world study with wayfinding experts in an unknown residential neighborhood. We aimed to assess how two different landmark visualization styles (abstract 2D vs. realistic 3D buildings) would affect experts’ spatial learning in a map-assisted navigation task during an emergency scenario. Using a between-subjects design, we asked Swiss military personnel to follow a given route using a mobile map, and to identify five task-relevant landmarks along the route. We recorded experts’ gaze behavior while navigating and examined their spatial learning after the navigation task. We found that experts’ spatial learning improved when they focused their visual attention on the environment, but the direction of attention between the map and the environment was not affected by the landmark visualization style. Further, there was no difference in spatial learning between the 2D and 3D groups. Contrary to previous research with general populations, this study suggests that the landmark visualization style does not enhance expert navigators’ navigation or spatial learning abilities, thus highlighting the need for population-specific mobile map design solutions