Wayfinding and description strategies in an unfamiliar complex building

Wayfinding and description strategies in an unfamiliar complex building Thora Tenbrink (tenbrink@uni-bremen.de) SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition, Universitat Bremen, Germany Evelyn Bergmann (e.bergmann@uni-bremen.de) SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition, Universitat Bremen, Germany Lars Konieczny (lars.konieczny@cognition.uni-freiburg.de) SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition, Universitat Freiburg, Germany and in part distorted (Canter, 1977; Tversky, 1981). In order to deal with this limitation, people consult maps or verbal descriptions (with equal benefit, cf. Meilinger & Knauff, 2008), or they draw upon cognitive strategies of wayfinding (Golledge, 1999), with different implications for outdoor (Wiener et al., 2004) versus indoor (Holscher et al., 2006) environments. In this paper, we will address indoor environments (complex buildings) with a particular focus on the verbalization of routes as well as wayfinding strategies. Abstract Describing routes is an easy everyday task for people who know the environment well. However, strategies exist also for situations where only incomplete knowledge is available. We present a study eliciting verbalized route plans and think- aloud data from novices and experts who were asked to find and describe routes in a complex building. The spatial descriptions were analyzed relating the level of knowledge to route efficiency, and to occurrences of particular linguistic elements. Results reveal a diversity of wayfinding and description strategies, ranging from generic methods via building specific strategies to classic turn-by-turn directions. Experience with the building predicted the performance in finding efficient paths as well as the extent to which concrete spatial elements and uncertainty or orientation markers occurred in the descriptions. These findings open up the possibility of predicting the expertise of a speaker from the form as well as the contents of a route description. Wayfinding and description strategies Keywords: route descriptions; cognitive map; incomplete knowledge; wayfinding strategies. Introduction Imagine asking someone for the way, and hearing in response uhm, well, you could just try walking to the right here, look out for the signs, best search for the main stair- case, it must be there somewhere . You would recognize that this person is no expert of the environment – yet this is far from a denial to respond. On the contrary, you might even follow this advice, even though it is just a vague hint. But what exactly is it in this utterance that reveals the speaker's cognitive status? And what is the nature of those hints that speakers with limited spatial knowledge can possibly convey? Route descriptions can be viewed as a way of accessing speakers’ current spatial representation of an environment. Research in this area has mostly centered on typical turn-by- turn directions (Denis, 1997; Lovelace & Montello, 1999). This kind of detailed instruction presupposes a considerable degree of familiarity with the environment. Often, research focuses on pre-defined paths, aiming to elicit those elements that are most crucial for conveying a route efficiently. However, clearly this research only captures description, not planning or wayfinding strategies in relation to variable knowledge. Yet the underlying assumption of (reasonably) complete knowledge represents the exception rather than the rule. Human knowledge of environments is typically limited Knowledge about a building determines not only how people navigate and find their way around, but also how comfortable they feel in it without the risk of losing orientation (Carlson et al., 2010), and how they will talk about it when describing the setting and guiding others along their way. In spite of the fact that all of these issues belong to everyday experience, surprisingly little is known about how humans actually deal with incomplete knowledge when finding their way around in complex buildings. Much research has proved the crucial impact of landmarks on human understanding of spatial environments – particularly outside of buildings (e.g., Presson & Montello, 1988; Caduff & Timpf, 2008). Humans use landmarks to orient and locate their own position, to retrace a route, to find the correct direction towards a destination, to describe routes to others, and so on. However, the extent to which such findings can be transferred to indoor scenarios remains unclear, except for findings highlighting the particular role of central points (well-known parts of a building) for orientation (Garling et al., 1983) as well as wayfinding strategies (Holscher et al., 2006). Similar observations can be made concerning other route elements, such as hallways or other types of paths within buildings, their names or features, directions or angles, distances, and so on. Some of the available results so far point to systematic effects of particular spatial tasks, goals, or configurational features leading to a difference in the conceived salience of spatial entities of various types (Peponis et al., 1990; Weisman, 1981). However, the role of knowledge of the environment in question remains unclear. Wayfinding strategies may be based either on rational reasoning processes in relation to a given goal, or on contextual factors that may influence the wayfinders'