Supporting inferences in space – A wayfinding task in a multilevel building

The explorative study presented in this paper investigates indoor wayfinding strategies and inferences of users in an unknown building. Participants were asked to find two consecutive targets in a multilevel building with the help of written route instructions. Routes were generated by a dialogue system and tested against adjusted instructions containing additional architectural information. The empirical findings suggest that selectively adding structural information can help (1) to build up a participant’s cognitive map and support inferences about returning paths, (2) a guidance system optimize its wayfinding process to avoid redundancy with respect to the human-friendly principle, and (3) to improve to a great extent the effectiveness and efficiency of the system itself, and generate more adaptive and intuitive route instructions.