WAYFINDING BEHAVIOR AND SPATIAL COGNITION

Spatial Orientation, Wayfinding, and Representation

Agent-Based Simulation of Spatial Cognition and Wayfinding in Building Fire Emergency Evacuation

There is a need to understand how people and environment react in a fire building emergency. Sometimes in the wayfinding process decision errors may occur mainly based on topological errors of the signage. A situation is critical if a decision about which path to take cannot be made with certainty, especially in a crisis situation. An agent-based simulation of human’s behavior in escaping from ...

Age differences in adults' spatial abilities, learning environmental layout, and wayfinding behavior

Empirical relations among age, general spatial ability as assessed by psychometric tests, wayfinding-related skills as assessed by experimental tasks in the laboratory, environmental layout learning as assessed in a field experiment, and wayfinding behavior as observed in a field experiment were modeled in a study involving 120 younger and 120 older adults. The best-fitting model showed that ag...

Getting From Here to There: Spatial Anxiety, Wayfinding Strategies, Direction Type, and Wayfinding Efficiency

We investigated the efficiency with which men and women find their way to novel destinations using directions containing landmarks or cardinal descriptors and how such wayfinding performance is related to differences in spatial anxiety and wayfinding strategies. In two experiments, participants navigated through a model town using landmark or cardinal directions. Men and women were faster and m...

The Floor Strategy: Wayfinding Cognition in a Multi-Level Building

This short paper is concerned with strategies and cognitive processes of wayfinding in public buildings. We conducted an empirical study in a complex multi-level building, comparing performance measures of experienced and inexperienced participants in different wayfinding tasks. Thinking aloud protocols provided insights into navigation strategies, planning phases, use of landmarks and signage....