Novice participants were given a schematic map of a multilevel building and performed a series of wayfinding tasks. Consistent with previous research, we found a mix of wayfinding strategies adopted by participants. Further analysis showed that participants incrementally developed and used mental representations of the building by integrating perceptual cues and memories of visited locations wi...

A virtual environment (VE) has been designed for functioning as a threedimensional interface to a repository of images and sounds. This paper attempts to study design interface in VEs. This study first examines the characteristics of VEs. The difference between physical and virtual environments is also studied. The relationship between both is classified as three types, i.e. complement, replace...

It is difficult for a navigator to find a way to a given target location in an unfamiliar environment. Often, wayfinding guidance such as an overview map is provided to assist the navigator. However, overview maps can only show survey knowledge at one particular scale, and cannot provide other kinds of spaital knowledge (e.g. procedure knowledge) or survey knowledge at different scales. In this...

Wayfinding ability has a high adaptive value, allowing humans to efficiently explore an environment in order to have a goal-oriented activity. The ability to orient in space starts declining with age and it constitute one of the main signs of cognitive impairment in neurological patients. Spatial orientation decline constitutes however an high limitation for elderly population and it has a grea...

In anthropology, research on human spatial orientation (wayfinding) has centered on two conflicting theories: the "mental map," whereby humans build abstract cognitive representations of the spatial relations between objects, and "practical mastery," which rejects the idea that such abstract representations exist and, in its most developed form, suggests that wayfinding is a process of moving f...

When navigating in real physical environments, as human beings we tend to display systematic or near-systematic errors with distance, direction and other navigation issues. To avoid making these errors, we choose different stratategies to find our way. While there have been a lot of HCI studies of navigation design guidelines for using maps or speech-based or tactile-based guidance in mobile de...

Human factors play a significant part in the time taken to evacuate due to an emergency. An agent-based simulation, using the Prometheus methodology (SEEP 1.5), has been developed to study the complex behavior of human (the ‘agents’) in high-rise building evacuations. In the case of hostel evacuations, simulation results show that pre-evacuation phase takes 60.4% of Total Evacuation Time (TET)....

This paper will focus on Global Positioning System (GPS) and it’s applied use as technological assistance for dynamic wayfinding. Through an overview of the cognitive strategies utilized in wayfinding i t identifies some of the affordances offered by mobile GPS devices. As background it discusses map use and the acquisition of spatial knowledge, and additionally outlines the nature of spatial d...

Establishing verbal memory traces for non-verbal stimuli was reported to facilitate or inhibit memory for the non-verbal stimuli. We show that these effects are also observed in a domain not indicated before-wayfinding. Fifty-three participants followed a guided route in a virtual environment. They were asked to remember half of the intersections by relying on the visual impression only. At the...

We propose that spatial inferences made during planning and executing a route influence the learning of relative locations through wayfinding. In Experiment 1, separate and combined route plans were compared. The results suggest that inferring multiple directions during the initial stage of planning leads to more accurate representations of relative locations than planning a single route. In Ex...