IMPACT OF LANDMARK IDENTIFICATION AND ROUTE LEARNING STRATEGIES IN SPATIAL NAVIGATION

Abstract

We live in a tumultuous world with a variety of objects, shapes, and colors. Hence, we need a range of spatial navigational skills and capabilities in our daily lives, such as cautiously crossing the street and carefully driving a vehicle. Finding the correct route and arriving at a specific location is challenging. We use various signs and images (visual and verbal) to help us identify landmarks and places in an open or closed natural space. The first stage is per-attention, in which the brain gathers sensory information about the basic features (colors, shape, and movement) in the field of vision. Humans integrate their awareness of the features in the second stage of attention, enabling them to see the whole scene. It is still unclear what visual features aid human spatial orientation, landmark identification, route learning, and navigation. This study aims to gain an empirical understanding of the function of navigation conditions and identify the features in the environment that travelers should pay special attention to, which will improve their wayfinding skills. The current research investigates whether and how people use structurally and culturally significant landmarks can ease spatial orientation and landmark identification. How visual distractors affect human route learning. This thesis conducted two virtual reality experiments to assess the human ability to identify landmarks and route learning under different experimental conditions. This research can help future navigation designers, visual ergonomists, and spatial cognitive researchers highlight the features of a landmark and when it should be displayed in navigation systems, and the characteristics involved in route learning. For example, future navigation assistance may dynamically display colors on signboards or communications according to the social contexts of the way-finder. Study I investigated the perceptual experiences of Indian males and females on structurally significant buildings. Participants answered five questions about identifiability, comfort, male-centric, environment space, and place sociability of the structurally significant buildings. The virtual building perception significantly varies between male and female participants. Males rated significantly higher on the level of comfort and level of male-centric compared to females. Findings indicated the efficacy of sex differences in social, cultural, and sex preferences in selecting virtual models. The selected sex-neutral building models on the basis of Study I have been used in Study II to examine human landmark identification.Study II investigated the role of route instruction and bird’s eye view during landmark identification. The study also aims to examine the role of environmental color on human wayfinding. In particular, the study answers the question of whether a bird’s eye view or a route instruction would reduce wayfinding time in spatial landmark identification in colored and black and white environmental settings. I expected that landmark identification time would be reduced with the use of an updated bird's eye view. Also expected that environmental color could support the landmark identification accuracy and reduce wayfinding time. My findings show a statistically significant effect of environmental color on landmark identification. Results of trajectory analysis indicate that the number of deviations by participants from the shortest possible route is less in Black and white (B/W) conditions than in colored conditions. The study results demonstrated that wayfinding could be brought down with the combined use of route instruction and a bird's eye view. In Study III, we investigated the role of implicit environmental features on human route learning using short (6 junctions) and long (12 junctions) route mazes. Participants did route learning in the presence and absence of environmental features. We observed that the route learning performance was better in the presence of environmental features than when it is not presented. The participants assigned to the condition with environmental features randomly encountered threatening and neutral stimuli in route junctions. We observed that participants took less decision time in the presence of threatening stimuli compared to the presence of neutral stimuli. Moreover, better route learning performance was observed on the short route compared to the long route. The number of repeated trials in the test phase was comparatively higher in long routes than in short routes, indicating that the long route required higher cognitive demand than short routes. The findings indicated the effect of implicit environmental factors on complex route wayfinding. In summary, this thesis has identified a number of cognitive and contextual conditions related to human landmark identification and route learning. Based on these conditions, the present work illustrates the relevance of environmental information and its impact on human spatial wayfinding. For example, my analysis of landmark identification performance revealed that a clearly stated route instruction could ease the wayfinding process more than a bird’s eye view, which could even become a visual distractor in virtual navigation. Similarly, the route learning performance revealed that people ignore the salient features of their surroundings if they have a more cognitive load.The above findings confirm that wayfinding depends on the trilateral relationship between a navigator, the environment, and geographic features. These findings have implications for navigation design in daily life, notably in transportation, mitigation, military wayfinding, interior design, and other everyday settings (e.g., shopping centers, hospitals, complex office buildings, and outdoor environments). The information on environmental features could be used to produce more effective Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation systems, internet-based mapping, and route planning services that are useful in complicated and novel environments.