Wayfinding with Maps and Verbal Directions

This experiment investigated the role of the source of information as well as the route complexity for wayfinding performance and wayfinding knowledge acquired. Participants had to find a complex and a simple route in an unknown city with figural instructions (map) and verbal instructions (directions). The participants reported transforming the map into verbal directions; therefore no general difference between the instructions was found. On oblique intersections which were difficult to code verbally participants recalling the map tended to perform better but built up worse route knowledge. Figural information from the map was only used for wayfinding or pointing if these tasks could not be solved otherwise

How Effective Is Strategic Bombing?Lessons Learned from World War II to Kosovo,

The issue of strategic bombing’s effec- tiveness is vitally important to political and military leaders. U.S. Air Force doc- trine has argued for decades that airpower’s ability to operate directly and immediately at the strategic level of war is its unique and defining characteris- tic—a characteristic that must be ex- ploited. Many disagree, so the debates have been long and heated. Gian Gentile, a serving Army officer, now adds to the literature on this important subject. Unfortunately, he never really comes to grips with the key issue of effec- tiveness implied by the title of his book. Rather, he has chosen to replow some old ground, looking anew at the U.S. Strate- gic Bombing Survey (USSBS), chartered by President Franklin Roosevelt to exam- ine and report on the effects of strategic bombing in World War II. Measuring bombing’s effectiveness and examining the workings of the USSBS that studied bomb effects are two different things

From Isovists via Mental Representations to Behaviour: First Steps Toward Closing the Causal Chain

This study addresses the interrelations between human wayfinding performance, the mental representation of routes, and the geometrical layout of path intersections. The virtual reality based empirical experiment consisted of a route learning and reproduction task and two choice reaction tasks measuring the acquired knowledge of route decision points. In order to relate the recorded behavioural data to the geometry of the environment, a specific adaptation of isovist-based spatial analysis was developed that accounts for directional bias in human spatial perception and representation. Taken together, the applied analyses provided conclusive evidence for correspondences between geometrical properties of environments as captured by isovists and their mental representation

The Floor Strategy: Wayfinding Cognition in a Multi-Level Building

This short paper is concerned with strategies and cognitive processes of wayfinding in public buildings. We conducted an empirical study in a complex multi-level building, comparing performance measures of experienced and inexperienced participants in different wayfinding tasks. Thinking aloud protocols provided insights into navigation strategies, planning phases, use of landmarks and signage. Three specific strategies for navigation in multi-level buildings were compared. The cognitively efficient floor strategy was preferred by experts over a central-point strategy or a direction strategy, and overall was associated to better wayfinding performance