Chapter 1. Introduction 1.1 Background and Motivation
The scenario described below happens on a daily basis that you might be familiar with. In your places, whether they are office building complexes or campus areas, you find someone holding a map, looking around, rotating the map in order to locate themselves on the map. After spending a few moments trying and sweating, he or she would come to you and ask for directions. Now it’s your turn to make a decision. Whether you are going to give him/her detailed verbal directions of the route to the destination?
Or you will draw a route map for them? And still another option is that you would choose to lead him/her to the destination.
The above scenario depicts the importance and complexity of wayfinding, which means the process of traveling from the starting point to the destination (Golledge, 1999a).
In our daily lives, we all have to make movement between two or more places, whether
they are in familiar or in unfamiliar environments. Getting lost in an unfamiliar environment during wayfinding would result in additional cost of time and money, and sometimes even at the cost of life.
Wayfinding is an important daily practice for all humans, but successful wayfinding is by no means an easy task. Before wayfinding, the starting point and the destination must be decided in advance. Sometimes, however, the destination is not clear or specific.
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For example, the destination might be just a name of a restaurant without address, which means the wayfinding route between the starting point and the destination could not be predefined. Wayfinders therefore would require navigational aids, e.g. maps or GPS devices, to assist in deciding wayfinding route. Second, during wayfinding process, wayfinders have to monitor the environment and the location of themselves to ensure they are on the decided route. Once getting lost, wayfinders have to relocate themselves by checking on the navigational aids or asking help from others. Finally, correction recognition of the destination is the last while the most important step in wayfinding.
Mistakes in any of the elements of wayfinding process would make successful arrival to the destination impossible.
Given the significance of wayfinding, it is not surprising that multiple disciplines address their research in wayfinding. For example, psychologists have investigated the spatial cognition of wayfinding. Psychological studies have either focused on the developmental stages of spatial cognition, or on the mental representations of textual and graphical form of spatial information, or on the mental processing capacities.
Environmental scientists, on the other hand, have been interested in the relationship between environmental characteristics and wayfinding performance. They have provided different types of geographical features and quantitative measures of the complexity of street shapes, which have been potentially related to wayfinding. Also pedestrian flows
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have been studied to better design building structures.
With the advancement of technology, wayfinding testing environments have changed a lot. Virtual environment (VE) techniques allow images of real-world or computer graphics to project on computer screens. Although virtual environment studies have higher efficiency of time and better experimental controls than outdoor real-life experiments of wayfinding, the ecological validity of virtual environment studies is not yet tested. Thus whether the results from the virtual environment studies are applicable to real-world wayfinding behavior remains unknown.
1.2 Objectives and Research Questions
Wayfinding is never an easy task for many people. In the process of wayfinding, factors such as environmental characteristics, prior knowledge about the traffic network, and cognitive properties of wayfinders all take part in. That is why wayfinding is a popular and practical issue and attracts academic research interest from various study fields.
In order to understand why and how wayfinders may succeed or fail in finding the destination, we tried to investigate wayfinding from a broader perspective. Previous studies have taken one perspective between the psychological or environmental approach.
To achieve a more comprehensive understanding of complex wayfinding behavior, it is necessary to integrate both psychological and environmental factors in one study.
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Therefore, the first study objective aims to systematically test the role of psychological and environmental factors and the interactions between the two factors.
The second study objective is related to the first objective and addresses a more practical issue: how to give directions to wayfinders that ask for directions. Giving directions is perhaps not as easy as you might think. There are several types of direction guides, such as verbal instructions and map drawing. Previous studies, however, have never distinguish the effects of different direction guides. In this study, different types of information of the same wayfinding route were tested and suggestions of how to give directions were made.
The third study objective concerns about different wayfinding testing environments.
Computer interface or virtual environment has gained its popularity in wayfinding research because of low cost of time and money comparing to real-world environment.
Although virtual environment has many advantages, whether human subjects behave in the virtual environment as the same pattern as they do in real-world environment has not yet tested. We would like to bridge the gap between different testing environments and develop a potential online training course of improving wayfinding performance.
Based on the research objectives stated above, here are the core questions of wayfinding that will be investigated in this study.
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First, are the wayfinding studies on different interfaces comparable? Could the study results on computer interface extend to real-world wayfinding behavior?
Second, what is the underlying cognitive knowledge of wayfinders? To be specific, how do psychological geospatial abilities interact with knowledge of the environment?
Third, would the strategies adopted by individuals during wayfinding process make differences? How to we give wayfinders more effective cues according his/her own preferable strategies?
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