Language and spatial cognition: comparing the roles of landmarks and street names in route instructions

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the processes involved when people use spatial descriptions intended to assist navigation. More specifically, we compared the effectiveness of route directions in an urban environment based on references either to landmarks or to street names. In the first experiment, the participants learned route directions that referred either to landmarks or to streets named after landmarks (e.g. a hospital vs. 'Hospital Street'). Processing times were shorter for instructions based on landmarks than for those based on street names. When the participants subsequently drew the route described, their memory was better when they had processed landmark rather than street information. The same route directions were used in the second experiment, in which the participants' memories were tested in a recognition task. The results showed that when target words referred to landmarks, the participants were more accurate and took less time to respond than when the same words were used to refer to streets. This finding indicates that the results of the previous experiment cannot be attributed to differing costs of the retrieval processes. Overall, the results of these experiments confirm the special cognitive status of landmarks in the mental representation of routes.

“Turn Left” Versus “Walk Towards the Café”: When Relative Directions Work Better Than Landmarks

“…Our aim is to compare the effectiveness of landmark-based instructions with relative direction (left/right/straight) instructions (and with combinations such as "Turn left towards the X"). Several studies have pointed out that landmarks play a special role in the communication of route directions [2,5,9,17,19,21,24]. However, direction givers do not always prefer to give a landmark-based instruction and by studying in situ route instructions given by people, we noted that this seems to depend on where the instruction is given.…”

“…In Daniel & Denis' study [24], about 14-20% of route directions did not include a landmark. In Rehrl's study [20], in which participants were giving directions in situ, while walking along the route, only 1-7.4% of the directions were instructions without a landmark.…”

“…While street names do not serve as good landmarks because they cannot easily be identified [24], streets themselves can serve as landmarks if they are described vividly in terms of their outstanding features [25].…”

“…Striegnitz et al [22]), focusing mostly on the generation of referring expressions. For directions given to pedestrians, studies typically involve the direction follower to find a route on a map or draw a route on paper [14,17,24].…”

Modeling Spatial Knowledge for Generating Verbal and Visual Route Directions

“…Empirical studies demonstrated that landmarks facilitate navigation and that people prefer to use landmarks over street names when giving route directions themselves [24]. A formal representation language for route elements called wayfinding choremes is proposed and extended with context-specific landmarks [10,12,19].…”