Navigation Strategies in Regionalized Environments

In this work three navigation experiments are reported that studied use and interaction of navigation strategies both during the learning of a virtual environment and during subsequent route planning tasks. Special interest concerned the role of regions within the environments. Results from experiment 1 suggest that the regions are perceived and encoded in spatial memory very early during the process of learning an evironment. During navigation such regional information could be used to ovecome missing or imprecise detailed spatial information. Experiment 2 and experiment 3 studied the use and interaction of route planning strategies that are applied after an environment has been learned. Results suggest that (i.) human route planning is based on region-connectivity and not place-connectivity alone, (ii.) that route planning takes into account the distribution of multiple target locations and (iii.) the complexity of alternative paths.