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Supra-individual consistencies in navigator-driven landmark placement for spatial learning

2014; Wiley; Volume: 36; Issue: 36 Linguagem: Inglês

1551-6709

Rul von Stülpnagel, Saskia Kuliga, Simon J. Buechner, Christoph Hölscher,

Augmented Reality Applications

Supra-individual consistencies in navigator-driven landmark placement for spatial learning Rul von Stulpnagel (rul.von.stuelpnagel@cognition.uni-freiurg.de) Abteilung fur Kognitionswissenschaft, IIG, Friedrichstr. 50 Freiburg 79100, Germany Saskia Kuliga (saskia.kuliga@cognition.uni-freiburg.de) Abteilung fur Kognitionswissenschaft, IIG, Friedrichstr. 50 Freiburg 79100, Germany Simon J. Buchner (buechner@ucf.uni-freiburg.de) University College Freiburg, Bertoldstr. 17 Freiburg 79085, Germany Christoph Holscher (christoph.hoelscher@gess.ethz.ch) Professur Kognitionswissenschaft, Clausiusstr. 59 Zurich 8092, Switzerland Abstract Landmarks are an essential part of human navigation. In most situations, landmarks used for navigation are available in the environment. However, landmarks can also be set up deliberately to facilitate future orientation. The question how such navigator-driven and individual landmark placement affects spatial learning and what strategies are used has rarely been examined. We addressed this question with two experiments. Participants explored virtual environments and placed landmarks with the aim of developing a mental map of the environment (measured by sketch mapping, Study 1) or to facilitate wayfinding (Study 2). Their performance was compared to participants who did not place landmarks. Landmarks were detrimental to sketch mapping (Study 1), and provided no significant advantage for wayfinding (Study 2). However, we found strong supra-individual consistencies of landmark placement strategies in both studies, implying a wisdom of the crowd for critical landmark locations. Keywords: virtual reality, landmarks, wayfinding, spatial learning strategies. Landmarks in human spatial learning Every sufficiently complex environment can turn into a confusing maze where one can easily get lost. This is especially true if the environment is visually sparse and lacks of visual elements -such as landmarks- that distinguish one location from another. Several ancient myths (e.g., Theseus and the Minotaur) and classic fairy-tales (e.g., Hansel and Gretel) tell us about such challenges and approaches to overcome them. Research on spatial cognition has emphasized the role of landmarks as an essential aspect of human orientation and spatial learning. Golledge (1999) stated that “landmarks usually act as anchor points for organizing other spatial information into a layout.” Despite their central role in human orientation, it has turned out to be surprisingly difficult to pinpoint the defining characteristics of a landmark. Several findings indicate that landmarks at decision points are more important for human navigation than landmarks at other locations (e.g., Michon & Denis, 2001), whereas other studies report rather contradictory findings (Schwering, Li, & Anacta, 2013). More formal frameworks attempt to characterize the importance of landmarks according to their visual, structural, and semantic salience and distinctiveness (Raubal & Winter, 2002). In the optimal case, this would allow the automatic assessment of the most relevant landmark in a given location. Orientation in built environments can also rely on a special form of landmarks: Signs are deliberately set up to reduce the cognitive demands of wayfinding in a building into a simple matching of pictograms (Holscher, Buchner, Brosamle, Meilinger, & Strube, 2007). Signs can serve different purposes (see Passini, 1984). For example, they are (similar to landmarks) considered more relevant for orientation when positioned at decision points. However, signs may also suffer under a number of deficiencies such as poor positioning, which may affect their probability to be detected at all (Xie, Filippidis, Galea, Blackshields, & Lawrence, 2012). Thus, a sophisticated rationale for sign positioning is desirable. These considerations concern landmarks already available in the environment. However, landmarks can also be set up by an individual in order to facilitate orientation. For example, hikers and scouts sometimes deliberately create landmarks to find their way back. But contrary to the popularity of Hansel and Gretel and their breadcrumb trace, there is almost no research that has investigated how people make use of such individually placed landmarks. Ruddle (2008) describes a computational method for generating trails, but not distinctive landmarks, in a virtual environment. Supportive evidence is reported by Cliburn, Winlock, Rilea, and Van Donsel (2007), who found that participants with individually or preplaced landmarks