Abstract
Geospatial images, such as maps and aerial photographs, are important sources of spatial knowledge that people use for wayfinding. The rapid development of geodata acquisition and digital graphics has recently led to rather complete geographic coverage of both traditional and novel types of geospatial images. Divergent types of geospatial images vary in their support of human acquisition of spatial knowledge. However, evaluative studies about the acquisition of spatial knowledge from the diversity of geospatial images have been rare. In this article, we review a variety of literature about the acquisition of spatial knowledge while paying particular attention to the role of geospatial images. Based on the literature, we present a framework of image parameters that characterize the acquisition of spatial knowledge from geospatial images: vantage point, number of visible vertical features, and visual realism. With the help of the framework, we evaluate commonly used geospatial images. In concordance with the previous experiments, our evaluation shows that the different types of geospatial images have large differences in the types of spatial knowledge they support and to what extent. However, further experimentation is needed in order to better understand the human cognitive needs for geospatial images and to develop more useful geospatial images for wayfinding.
Highlights
Wayfinding is an everyday activity that people perform during the simplest transitions inside buildings as well as during complex route traversals through urban environments
Cognitively challenging wayfinding occurs in unfamiliar environments, where new environments must be integrated into the internal spatial representation
Everyday human wayfinding is dependent on the spatial knowledge stored in internal spatial representations called cognitive maps [70] or cognitive collages [72]
Summary
Wayfinding is an everyday activity that people perform during the simplest transitions inside buildings as well as during complex route traversals through urban environments. Learning unfamiliar environments often begins with surveying a geospatial image such as a map or an aerial photograph The supply of such images has exploded during the last few decades due to the development of geospatial data capture and visualization techniques in parallel with the available computing power and communication technologies. Human wayfinding has been an active field of research for the psychological and cognitive sciences for a century, but controlled experimentation on the use of geospatial images has been carried out only during last few decades (for example, early experiments by Thorndyke and Hayes-Roth [69] and Passini [58]). Common types of geospatial images are evaluated with the help of the framework created and needs for further experimental research on these image types are addressed (Section 5). In the end of the article, a summary is given of the review, and implications and restrictions of the review are discussed (Section 6)
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