Cognitive principles of schematisation for wayfinding assistance

People often need assistance to successfully perform wayfinding tasks in unfamiliar environments. Nowadays, a huge variety of wayfinding assistance systems exist. All these systems intend to present the needed information for a certain wayfinding situation in an adequate presentation. Some wayfinding assistance systems utilise findings for the field of cognitive sciences to develop and design cognitive ergonomic approaches. These approaches aim to be systems with which the users can effortless interact with and which present needed information in a way the user can acquire the information naturally. Therefore it is necessary to determinate the information needs of the user in a certain wayfinding task and to investigate how this information is processed and conceptualised by the wayfinder to be able to present it adequately. Cognitive motivated schematic maps are an example which employ this knowledge and emphasise relevant information and present it in an easily readable way. In my thesis I present a transfer approach to reuse the knowledge of wellgrounded knowledge of schematisation techniques from one externalisation such as map to another externalisation such as virtual environment. A analysis of the informational need of the specific wayfinding task route following is done one the hand of a functional decomposition as well as a deep analysis of representation-theoretic consideration of the external representations maps and virtual environments. Concluding from these results, guidelines for transferring schematisation principles between different representation types are proposed. Specifically, this thesis chose the exemplary transfer of the schematisation technique wayfinding choremes from a map presentation into a virtual environment to present the theoretic requirements for a successful transfer. Wayfinding choremes are abstract mental concepts of turning action which are accessible as graphical externalisation integrated into route maps. These wayfinding choremes maps emphasis the turning action along the route by displaying the angular information as prototypes of 45◦ or 90◦. This schematisation technique enhances wayfinding performance by supporting the matching processes between the map representation and the internal mental representation of the user.