Wayfinding Abilities Research Articles

Dementia-friendly architecture: environments that facilitate wayfinding in nursing homes.

Spatial disorientation is a prime reason for institutionalization. The autonomy of the residents and their quality of life, however, is strongly linked with their ability to reach certain places within their nursing home. The physical environment has a great potential for supporting a resident's wayfinding abilities. For this study, data were collected from 30 German nursing homes. Skilled nurses rated the resident's ability to perform 5 wayfinding tasks. The architectural characteristics of the homes were analyzed and their impact on the resulting scores was tested for statistical significance using the Mann-Whitney U test (P < .05). Results confirm that people with advancing dementia are increasingly dependent on a compensating environment. The significant factors include a small number of residents per living area, the straight layout of the circulation system without any changes in direction, and the provision of only 1 living/dining room. These and additional results were transformed into architectural guidelines.

Real and virtual mobility performance in simulated prosthetic vision

Wayfinding is an important activity that can be performed with limited visual resources, and thus may be an important application of early visual prostheses. In a pair of experiments we explored minimal visual resolution requirements of a simulated retinal electrode array for mobility in real and virtual environments, experienced by normally sighted subjects in video headsets. In experiment 1, inexperienced and experienced subjects traveled similar routes around a suite of offices with simulated implants of 4 × 4, 6 × 10 and 16 × 16 dots. In experiment 2, the effects of adding dynamic noise and removing a subset of ‘phosphenes’ from a 6 × 10 dot array on the mobility of experienced subjects through a series of different virtual 10-room buildings were determined. Performance was quantified in terms of time and navigation errors in both experiments, and wall contacts in the real environment; a compound score was also computed for trials in experiment 1. In experiment 1, inexperienced subjects required 16 × 16 dots for adequate performance, while experienced subjects reached similar levels with 6 × 10 dots. In experiment 2, dot removal up to 30% led to modest yet significant performance deterioration, and noise addition to slight but non-significant improvement, while practice led to a reduction in travel time by 50% over the 28-trial experiment. Error counts in experiment 2 were fairly high, but largely randomly distributed, and attributable to the high risk of becoming disoriented in the sparse visual environment. Substantial performance level differences were found between subjects, spanning a threefold range even after practice. The findings suggest that a retinal implant with as few as 60 electrodes may provide independent wayfinding abilities to the adventitiously blind, but that substantial practice and supervision will be required in learning this task.

Wayfinding in familiar and unfamiliar environments in a case of progressive topographical agnosia

A 71-year-old right-handed man (F.G.) presents with prosopagnosia and with an inability to recognize famous and familiar buildings. Despite his deficit, F.G. obtained normal scores on neuropsychological tests of executive functions, language, praxis and primary visuoperceptual skills. Brain MRI showed atrophy predominantly in the right temporal lobe, particularly in the fusiform gyrus and the parahippocampal cortex. The present study investigated F.G.’s ability to orient himself in familiar and new environments. His wayfinding abilities in a familiar environment (i.e., his hometown) were preserved despite an inability to recognize familiar and famous buildings, monuments and landmarks in this environment. Wayfinding was achieved through a heavy reliance on written indications (e.g., names of restaurants and streets), preservation of a pre-existing cognitive map of this familiar environment, and normal executive functions necessary to plan the execution of a given trajectory. In an unfamiliar environment, F.G.’s topographical agnosia resulted in severe wayfinding difficulties and in the inability to build an adequate cognitive spatial representation. F.G.’s topographical agnosia results from a high-level visuoperceptual deficit, characterized by an inability to access a global configuration of complex visual stimuli such as familiar and famous monuments, and an over-reliance on the processing of local features.

The Effect of Spatial Tasks on Visually Impaired Peoples’ Wayfinding Abilities

Thirty-eight people with visual impairments learned a 483-meter novel route through a university campus in four groups: verbalization, modeling, pointing, and control. The performance of all four groups improved with greater experience of the route, but the modeling group improved more than did the control group.

An instrumented vehicle assessment of problem behavior and driving style:: Do younger males really take more risks?

An instrumented vehicle was used to obtain behavioral data from 61 drivers ranging in age from 18 to 82. Each driver completed a personality questionnaire and participated in a study described as an evaluation of cognitive mapping and way-finding abilities. An evaluation of relationships between age, personality and driving style revealed that driver age and type A personality characteristics were significant predictors of vehicle speed and following distance, P<0.05. However, contrary to the earlier research, which relies heavily on a self-reported driving criterion, no significant gender differences were obtained. A factor analysis of several at-risk driving behaviors identified a cluster of correlated driving behaviors that appeared to share a common characteristic identified as aggressive/impatient driving. It is suggested that the correlated cluster of driving behavior provide objective support for the assumptions of response generalization and problem behavior theory. Results are discussed with regard to implications for safe driving interventions and a problem behavior syndrome.

A Multiple Case Study of Wayfinding in Dementia of the Alzheimer Type: Decision Making

Difficulties in finding ones way around familiar and unfamiliar places are among the first clinical signs of dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT). Few systematic studies have directly examined this ability. This paper reports on wayfinding abilities and decision making of fourteen patients at the early and intermediate stages of the disease. They were asked to reach a destination in a hospital. Each patient was matched with two control subjects. Their verbalizations during the route were recorded, transcribed and content-analyzed to identify decisions according to a pre-established typology. Multiple correspondence analysis was used to reveal patterns of decision making. For the original trip, results showed that DAT patients still had the ability to deal with decisions considered basic and concrete. However, decisions based on higher intellectual abilities were much more difficult.

Young Children's Spatial Representations Developed through Exploration of a Desktop Virtual Reality Scene

Virtual Reality (VR) technology seems to offer the opportunity of designing 3D worlds and navigation activities which provide settings that are close to children's everyday experiences, capitalising on their enthusiasm for videogame-like technologies. This paper describes how different types of exploration of a VR scene by 6[emsp4 ]y-old children affected their performance in a series of spatial tasks. Individual children explored a desktop virtual world where we varied both the visual perspective on the VR scene (route vs. survey view) and the level of exploration control (active vs. passive movement). We measured children's knowledge of the spatial layout of the environment through their memory of objects' location in the virtual scene and through the analysis of their wayfinding abilities within the scene. The results indicate that children were able to develop and display different levels of allocentric knowledge about the virtual world depending on the way they had familiarized with it and on the characteristics of the task demands. This finding contributes to inform the design of VR technologies aimed at supporting or evaluating spatial abilities in children of this age.

Cognitive Maps, Spatial Abilities, and Human Wayfinding

In this paper we discuss the relations between cognitive maps, spatial abilities and human wayfinding, particularly in the context of traveling without the use of sight. Initially we discuss the nature of cognitive maps and the process of cognitive mapping as mechanisms for developing person to object (egocentric) and object to object (allocentric) internal representations. Imperfections in encoding either relations can introduce imperfections in representations of environments in memory. This, together with individual differences in human spatial abilities, can result in data manipulations that produce error. When information stored in long term memory is brought into working memory for purposes of decision making and choice behavior (as in route selection), the result may be the selection of an inefficient or incorrect path. We explore the connection between environmental learning and cognitive maps in the context of learning a route in two different cultural environments-Belfast (Northern Ireland) and Santa Barbara (California). Blind, vision impaired, and sighted volunteers traveled and learned routes of approximately the same length (1.2miles) in their respective urban environments. An initial trial was experimenter guided; three following trials were regarded as “test” trials where the participants learned the route and performed route fixing tasks including pointing between designated places, verbally describing the route after each completion, and building a model of the route using metallic strips on a magnetic board. Results indicated that by the end of the third test trial, and using the reinforcing strategies, the results of the blind or vision impaired participants could not be statistically differentiated from those of the sighted participants. This indicated that the wayfinding abilities of the three groups were equivalent in this experiment and suggested that spatial abilities were potentially the same in each group but that lack of sight interfered with putting knowledge into action.

THE ACQUISITION OF ROUTE AND SURVEY KNOWLEDGE FROM COMPUTER MODELS

Two experiments were conducted investigating a series of issues concerning the nature of the spatial knowledge obtained from a computer model of a campus environment. The issues investigated were: the relative acquisition of route and survey knowledge, the construction of survey knowledge over repeated exposures, the orientation-specific nature of the cognitive representation, and practical wayfinding abilities. A series of tests were administered to assess the route and survey knowledge of subjects who learned a campus environment from a map, computer model, or direct experience. The results indicated that computer experience leads to the acquisition of some elements of both route and survey knowledge. There was also evidence of orientation specificity and functional wayfinding knowledge.

Wayfinding by children and adults: Response to instructions to use look-back and retrace strategies.

The wayfinding abilities of 6- and 12-year-old children ware compared with those of 22-year-old adults. After their 1st walk across a university campus, participants were asked to lead the way back along the same route. Participants in 2 conditions (look back and retrace) were given instructions intended to prevent wandering, whereas those in a 3rd (uninstructed) condition were only told that they were going on a tour. A series of instructions to look back at the return path increased subsequent travel on route by the 2 older age groups. Instruction to monitor the familiarity of landmarks and to stop and retrace to a known portion of the path when feeling unsure did not effectively reduce travel off route. In general, wayfinding performance by 12-year-old children did not reliably differ from that of 22-year-old adults

Physical environmental cues to reduce the problems of incontinence in Alzheimer's disease units

Research has indicated that behavioral strategies such as cuing orientation within an environment may help reduce incontinence among dementia patients. However, there are no empirical studies that explore the relationship between incontinence and environmental modifications. This study compares the effectiveness of four nomenclatures such as “toilet” and “restroom” on the wayfinding abilities of residents in the early, middle, and advanced stages of dementia in two specially designed units. Results indicate that a series of directional arrows on the floor with the nomenclature “toilet” produced the most instances of utilization of public toilets in both units.