Wayfinding in road networks is a hierarchical process. It involves a sequence of tasks, starting with route planning, continuing with the extraction of wayfinding instructions, and leading to the actual driving. From one task level to the next, the relevant road network becomes more detailed. How does the wayfinding process change? Building on a previous, informal hierarchical highway navigatio...

The thesis presented here attempts to create a cognitively plausible simulation of human wayfinding in semistructured environments such as train stations. The goals are to characterise such environments, to formally represent them along with the wayfinding process in a computational model, and to use this model to analyse which environmental structures help making human wayfinding so reliable.

This study examines the working memory systems involved in human wayfinding. In the learning phase, 24 participants learned two routes in a novel photorealistic virtual environment displayed on a 220° screen while they were disrupted by a visual, a spatial, a verbal, or-in a control group-no secondary task. In the following wayfinding phase, the participants had to find and to "virtually walk" ...

In this paper I examine processes involved in place recognition and wayfinding in the context of spatial knowledge acquisition generally. Recognizing places is seen to be of vital importance in developing a declarative base: wayfinding is viewed as the most common means of acquinng place knowledge. Characteristics of place recognition are examined along with discussion of errors in place cognit...

Wayfinding is the study of how humans use a variety of informational media to orient themselves and navigate in a space, such as a library. This multi-method case study tested the applicability of a wayfinding framework developed in architecture to a public library environment. Research methods included unobtrusive observation of a random sample of users wayfinding in the facility and interview...

Previous recent research on human wayfinding has focused primarily on mental representations rather than processes of wayfinding. This paper presents a formal model of some aspects of the process of wayfinding, where appropriate elements of human perception and cognition are formally realized using image schemata and affordances. The goal-driven reasoning chain that leads to action begins with ...

Wayfinding signs play an important role in guiding users to navigate in a virtual environment and in helping pedestrians to find their ways in a real-world architectural site. Conventionally, the wayfinding design of a virtual environment is created manually, so as the wayfinding design of a real-world architectural site. The many possible navigation scenarios, and the interplay between signs a...

Existing cognitively based computational models for wayfinding focus primarily on the exploration of mental representations rather than the information needs for wayfinding. It is important to consider information needs because people trying to find their ways in unfamiliar environments do not have a previously acquired mental representation but depend on external information. The fundamental t...

Wayfinding is a basic activity people do throughout their entire lives as they navigate from one place to another. In order to create different spaces in such a way that they facilitate people’s wayfinding it is necessary to integrate principles of human spatial cognition into the design process. This paper presents a methodology to structure space based on experiental patterns, called image sc...