Orientation information in wayfinding instructions: evidences from human verbal and visual instructions

Abstract

Although the importance of landmarks for human navigation and for orientation is well accepted, most of today's navigation systems hardly incorporate any landmark information or information supporting orientation. Different from previous research that only addressed turn-by-turn instructions in verbal forms and landmarks at decision points, the present study provides empirical evidence that human-generated wayfinding instructions are not solely turn-by-turn but the majority of instructions provide orientation information. We propose a new classification scheme for identifying information in wayfinding instructions that will not only support orientation but also facilitate construction of mental map. We explored and compared two forms of representations-visual sketch map and verbal instructions. Results revealed that landmark information is important in human wayfinding instructions with particular importance of local landmarks along the route and global landmarks that support orientation. In addition, sketch maps contained more global landmarks than verbal instructions. In contrast to turn-by-turn navigation, we found that many instructions in human route descriptions do not always refer to turning actions but to orientation. We conducted interviews with a set of raters on what they consider helpful information in both forms of representations. These results confirmed our findings and supported that future route descriptions can be more meaningful and helpful when they are enriched with orientation information as they conform to how humans structure wayfinding instructions.

Spatial Learning with Orientation Maps: The Influence of Different Environmental Features on Spatial Knowledge Acquisition

“…It was shown that people include landmarks in route instructions, both at decision points and along the route [18][19][20][21][22]. Moreover, it was shown that besides local landmarks, global landmarks, i.e., off-route landmarks with sufficiently large reference region, are important features in human wayfinding instructions [23][24][25][26]. In contrast to contemporary turn-by-turn-based wayfinding support systems, human wayfinding instructions contain a significant amount of orientation information that support the acquisition of configurational knowledge [23].…”

“…Moreover, it was shown that besides local landmarks, global landmarks, i.e., off-route landmarks with sufficiently large reference region, are important features in human wayfinding instructions [23][24][25][26]. In contrast to contemporary turn-by-turn-based wayfinding support systems, human wayfinding instructions contain a significant amount of orientation information that support the acquisition of configurational knowledge [23]. Orientation information is considered to be any information, including local and global landmarks, that supports people to derive their position in space and orient themselves regarding known environmental information [27].…”

Effects of visual map complexity on the attentional processing of landmarks

“…These services not only offer maps for free [8,9], they also provide route planning functions [10,11]. Additionally, landmarks, salient objects in the environment [12][13][14], are represented in these maps as pictograms. Landmark representations not only support the formation of a cognitive map, they also facilitate orientation, as users can match them to surrounding landmarks in the environment and thereby triangulate their current positions [12,13,15].…”

“…Structural salience on the other hand represents the degree of visual attention allocated towards an object based on its relative position to a specified route [16,28]. In navigation tasks, four types of route elements relevant for wayfinding instructions and route knowledge [13,29,30] can be distinguished (see Fig 1). Decision points are positions where at least two road branches exist (e.g.…”

Retrieving Landmark Salience Based on Wikipedia: An Integrated Ranking Model

“…Moreover, along the route at decision points, it would be helpful to distinguish different geometries of landmarks-point-like, linear, etc. The size and shape of the landmark bear useful information for wayfinding instructions [50]. Additionally, adjustments could be done to match a local culture, urban density, and scale.…”