Abstract
Spatial representations are a result of multisensory information integration. More recent findings suggest that the multisensory information processing of a scene can be facilitated when paired with a semantically congruent auditory signal. This congruency effect was taken as evidence that audio-visual integration occurs for complex scenes. As navigation in our environment consists of a seamless integration of complex sceneries, a fundamental question arises: how is human landmark-based wayfinding affected by multimodality? In order to address this question, two experiments were conducted in a virtual environment. The first experiment compared wayfinding and landmark recognition performance in unimodal visual and acoustic landmarks. The second experiment focused on the congruency of multimodal landmark combinations and additionally assessed subject’s self-reported strategies (i.e., whether they focused on direction sequences or landmarks). We demonstrate (1) the equality of acoustic and visual landmarks and (2) the congruency effect for the recognition of landmarks. Additionally, the results point out that self-reported strategies play a role and are an under-investigated topic in human landmark-based wayfinding.
Highlights
Finding our way in everyday life does not seem to be a great challenge at first glance
The results show that wayfinding performance for acoustic landmarks (M = 10.64, SEM = 0.53) was only marginally better than for visual landmarks (M = 9.91, SEM = 0.65)
In a series of two experiments, we examined the role of multi-sensory information integration in human landmarkbased wayfinding
Summary
Finding our way in everyday life does not seem to be a great challenge at first glance. How finding the right path is affected by both multisensory cues and multisensory integration (i.e., binding cues from at least two different sensory modalities to form a single, meaningful object or entity) remains an outstanding issue. In order to address this issue, we will first exemplary describe situations in wayfinding which emphasize the importance of modalities other than vision. We will take a closer look to reference points during wayfinding, so-called landmarks, in which we will describe two important aspects of these landmarks: their inherent features and the sensory channels they trigger. We will conclude that especially the latter aspect has not been the primary object of research in human wayfinding. By examining the role of different sensory modalities and cognitive styles, we will try to gain insight into processes involved in human landmark-based wayfinding
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