Wayfinding in complex indoor environments can be a stressful and disorienting activity. Many factors contribute to this difficulty, one reason being the number of floors paired with many different and often unpredictable ways to get from one floor to another. This dissertation focuses on providing a comprehensive analysis of how the human cognitive system represents the spatial information in floor to floor transition points. In particular, this project will focus on the internal representations formed by people familiar with a particular complex environment. In order to accomplish this, a user study was conducted at the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History that drew participants from the Visitor Services Department. Participants were asked to give wayfinding descriptions to and from several landmarks in the museums with the majority of the routes spanning multiple floors. Both verbal descriptions and sketch map descriptions were studied. It was found that floor to floor transition points were often represented as landmarks with two landmarks in particular being represented often as both functional as well as reorientation landmarks. This finding continues the discussion on global landmarks and their representation and salience in large complex indoor environments
