Cognitive Aspects of Route Directions

This contribution provides an overview of elements of cognitively ergonomic route directions. Cognitive ergonomics, in general, seeks to identify characteristics of cognitive information processing and to formalize these characteristics such that they can be used to improve information systems. For route directions, an increasing number of behavioral studies have, for example, pointed to the following characteristics: the use of landmarks, changing levels of granularity, the qualitative description of spatial relations. The authors detail these aspects and additionally introduce formal approaches that incorporate them to automatically provide route directions that adhere to principles of cognitive ergonomics. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-2038-4.ch017