The effect of emotions and emotionally laden landmarks on wayfinding

The effect of emotions and emotionally laden landmarks on wayfinding Ceylan Z. Balaban (ceylan.z.balaban@psychol.uni-giessen.de) Florian Roser (florian.roeser@psychol.uni-giessen.de) Kai Hamburger (kai.hamburger@psychol.uni-giessen.de) Justus Liebig University Giessen, Department of Psychology, Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science Otto-Behaghel-Strasse 10 F 35394 Giessen, Germany Abstract Emotions have an influence on attention, decision making, and memory (all factors required for wayfinding). It is assumed that both an emotional state and emotionally laden landmarks have an impact on wayfinding and on later recollection of the path. We performed two experiments to investigate our hypotheses. First, in both experiments participants had to study a route in a virtual environment including landmarks. Then they passed a recognition and wayfinding task, which was repeated after one week. The mood was measured using the PANAS scale. In the first experiment the emotionally laden landmarks were used as a between-subject factor in order to investigate the effect of mood in wayfinding. The aim of the second experiment was to examine the effect of emotionallly laden landmarks (within-subject factor) without affecting the emotional state. Results show that emotions have no significant effect on correct recognition, wayfinding and response times (Experiment 1). For Experiment 2 the results show that the best wayfinding performance occurs when negatively laden landmarks were used. Recognition performance was similar, however, hardly decreased over time for the negative stimuli. These findings are discussed within the current research literature. Keywords: landmark; emotions; mood; wayfinding Introduction Spatial cognition is indispensable for successful mastery of our daily life and yet it seems to be almost always unconscious. Well-known paths become automated with time and require less working memory capacities, enabling us to pay more attention to other things. When it comes to taking new directions our undivided attention, as well as greater working memory capacities are necessary to avoid getting lost (Montello, 2009). Navigationally relevant information needs to be stored and becomes available later on. Landmarks serve as anchors in our mental representation of the physical environment and are used in the communication of route directions (e.g., Raubal & Winter, 2002). A landmark is an object or structure that marks a locality and is used as a point of reference. Everything that “stands out” from a scene can be a landmark (e.g., Caduff & Timpf, 2008). Landmark salience Landmarks should be salient. This means that an object needs to be conspicuous and pops out in comparison to other surrounding objects (Caduff & Timpf, 2008). The salience of objects is determined by structural, visual and cognitive (semantic) qualities (e.g., Caduff & Timpf, 2008). Objects are called structurally salient, “if their location is cognitively or linguistically easy to conceptualize in route directions” (Klippel & Winter, 2005; p. 1) or if they have a prominent spatial location (Raubal & Winter, 2002). Visual salience includes all visual features of an object such as size, color, shape, texture or contrast (Caduff & Timpf, 2008). Cognitively salient landmarks contain a high idiosyncratic relevance. So the personality of the observer should be taken into account because cognitive salience mainly depends on cultural, personal and historical influences. Emotion and navigation For successful wayfinding, landmarks have to be stored in memory. It is of particular interest which physical and psychological factors affect human wayfinding. So, how does an object become a landmark? According to the somatic marker hypothesis (Damasio, 1996), there is a connection between emotion and cognition in practical decision making and beyond that emotions are biologically indispensable to decisions. So each stimulus is ”marked” with certain visceral and non-visceral perceptions. They can be both positive and negative (Damasio, 1996). These perceptions are partly responsible for our decision making and complement the thinking process. Montello (2009) distinguishes between long-term psychological factors, which are character traits of people and tend to be persistent over time and short-term psychological factors like illness, fatigue or anxiety. These short-term psychological factors have in common that they reduce the attention of the observer (Montello, 2009). However, in contrast to the other psychological factors which Montello (2009) described, anxiety is deemed to be a basic emotion (Ekmann, 1999). Emotions play an important role in our lives. If we are happy, we perceive our environment in a different way than when we are sad or angry. Individuals in a positive mood tend to perceive their environment more globally, thus their information processing is less focused and details are blended out. Negative mood promotes a local focus and more detailed attention (Gasper & Clore, 2002). According to the feeling- as-information-theory (Schwarz & Clore, 1996) people attend to their feelings as a source of information and the use of feelings as a source of information follows the same principles as the use of any other information. Hence a