Abstract
Abstract. The prominence of landmarks in aiding pedestrian navigation has been highlighted in various studies; people rely strongly on visual landmarks, especially when navigating in unfamiliar environments. The paper describes the design and implementation of a study for assessing drivers’ spatial abilities, when navigating in an unfamiliar environment. Two types of route directions based on references to either landmarks or street names were given to two groups of participants. Three geospatial learning tasks are used to evaluate these abilities: map sketching, distance, and direction estimation. The findings showed that landmark-based route instructions help drivers develop a better cognitive map of the route. On the other hand, instructions either based on landmarks or on street information do not have an effect on distance or direction estimates. Nonetheless, qualitative analysis of directions and distances estimations gave interesting results. Findings associated with self-assessment of environmental spatial abilities using the Santa Barbara Sense of Direction Scale (SBSOD) seem to support prediction of at least one of the drivers’ abilities among those assessed in this study.
Highlights
A large portion of research on human navigation has focused on the evaluation of navigation and orientation abilities depending on the purpose and the properties of the route, the route instructions, and navigation systems
The aim of this study is to evaluate spatial abilities of non-professional drivers as well as their ability to build cognitive maps of an unknown environment depending on the form of navigation instructions they are given
There was no statistically significant difference in the map scores for landmark-based (M=5.00, SD=2.89) and street-based navigation (M=5.61, SD=2.06); t(19.76)=-0.61, p=.550, CI(95%): -2.73, 1.50. These results suggest that navigation instructions either based on landmarks or on street information do not have an effect on map sketching tasks examined all together
Summary
A large portion of research on human navigation has focused on the evaluation of navigation and orientation abilities depending on the purpose and the properties of the route, the route instructions, and navigation systems. It has been extensively documented that landmarks play a predominant role in human navigation and spatial memory (Daniel and Denis, 2004). Research has focused on the enrichment of navigation instructions using reference to landmarks (Basiri et al, 2016, Burnett et al, 2001, Denis et al, 2007, Klippel and Winter, 2005, Raubal and Winter, 2002). The enrichment of route instructions with salient landmarks (Raubal and Winter, 2002, Wage et al, 2018) and other survey knowledge (Sester and Dalyot, 2015) is considered a powerful alternative to conventional turn-by-turn instructions for facilitating spatial representation of the environment
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