An Ideal Navigator Model of Human Wayfinding: Learning One’s Way Around a New Town
نویسندگان
چکیده
Searching for a target in an unfamiliar environment requires acquiring, storing, processing, and recalling spatial information. We use datasets from two virtual reality navigation experiments to design and validate a simple biologically-inspired computational model of these processes. Subjects in both datasets play taxicab drivers, picking up and delivering passengers in a series of small virtual towns. After just a few deliveries, subjects learn to generate minimumdistance, novel paths between passengers and their destinations. Subjects’ rapid learning and near-ceiling performance inspires the creation of an ideal navigator model, which makes optimal use of sensory information to learn navigationally relevant spatial information about the environment as quickly as possible. We use MAGELLAN, a simple, two-parameter, ideal navigator model, as a benchmark against which to assess possible sources of subject error. By systematically degrading the ideal navigator’s vision and memory, MAGELLAN accounts for human subjects’ mean performance in both datasets, and correctly predicts the difficulty that subjects encounter in navigating different environments.
منابع مشابه
Modeling Human Spatial Navigation Using A Degraded Ideal Navigator
Navigation of novel environments requires an ability to acquire, store, and recall spatial information. A navigator can use this information to generate novel, efficient paths between arbitrarily-chosen locations in the environment. In the first section of this thesis I review relevant recent research into exploration and spatial learning. I examine biologically-inspired computational models of...
متن کاملWayfinding characteristics and familiarity indexes in an urban environment
Many people are encountered with finding the best way to reach to their destination. One definition for wayfinding is “the act of travelling to the destination by continuous processes of making route-choices whilst evaluating previous spatial decisions against stable cognition of the environment. General understanding and keen appraisal of the environment can aid decision-making process of how...
متن کاملThe effect of navigational expertise on wayfinding in new environments
Becoming proficient at navigation in urban environments is something that we all aspire to. Here we asked whether being an expert at wayfinding in one environment has any effect on learning new spatial layouts. Licensed London taxi drivers are among the most proficient urban navigators, training for many years to find their way around a complex and irregularly-laid out city. We first tested how...
متن کاملA Formal Model of the Process of Wayfinding in Built Environments
Previous recent research on human wayfinding has focused primarily on mental representations rather than processes of wayfinding. This paper presents a formal model of some aspects of the process of wayfinding, where appropriate elements of human perception and cognition are formally realized using image schemata and affordances. The goal-driven reasoning chain that leads to action begins with ...
متن کاملTaxonomy of Human Wayfinding Tasks: A Knowledge-Based Approach
Although the term “Wayfinding” has been defined by several authors, it subsumes a whole set of tasks that involve different cognitive processes, drawing on different cognitive components. Research on wayfinding has been conducted with different paradigms using a variety of wayfinding tasks. This makes it difficult to compare the results and implications of many studies. A systematic classificat...
متن کامل