Human navigation strategies and their errors result from dynamic interactions of spatial uncertainties.

Goal-directed navigation requires continuously integrating uncertain self-motion and landmark cues into an internal sense of location and direction, concurrently planning future paths, and sequentially executing motor actions. Here, we provide a unified account of these processes with a computational model of probabilistic path planning in the framework of optimal feedback control under uncertainty. This model gives rise to diverse human navigational strategies previously believed to be distinct behaviors and predicts quantitatively both the errors and the variability of navigation across numerous experiments.

Wayfinding and acquisition of spatial knowledge with navigation assistance.

Integrated visualizations for assisted navigation were investigated that support both wayfinding and spatial learning. Participants navigated a predefined route with assistance through a virtual environment, visiting five target locations. Wayfinding accuracy was assessed.

How to Best Name a Place? Facilitation and Inhibition of Route Learning Due to Descriptive and Arbitrary Location Labels.

Establishing verbal memory traces for non-verbal stimuli was reported to facilitate or inhibit memory for the non-verbal stimuli. We show that these effects are also observed in a domain not indicated before-wayfinding. Fifty-three participants followed a guided route in a virtual environment.

Configurational salience of landmarks: an analysis of sketch maps using Space Syntax.

We conducted a visibility graph analysis (a Space Syntax method) of a virtual environment to examine how the configurational salience of global and local landmarks (i.e., their relative positions in the environment) as compared to their visual salience affects the probability of their depiction on sketch maps.

Not all memories are the same: Situational context influences spatial recall within one's city of residency.

Reference frames in spatial memory encoding have been examined intensively in recent years. However, their importance for recall has received considerably less attention. In the present study, passersby used tags to arrange a configuration map of prominent city center landmarks.

When in doubt follow your nose-a wayfinding strategy.

Route selection is governed by various strategies which often allow minimizing the required memory capacity. Previous research showed that navigators primarily remember information at route decision points and at route turns, rather than at intersections which required straight walking. However, when actually navigating the route or indicating directional decisions, navigators make fewer errors when they are required to walk straight.

Reference frames in learning from maps and navigation.

In everyday life, navigators often consult a map before they navigate to a destination (e.g., a hotel, a room, etc.

Learning to navigate: experience versus maps.

People use "route knowledge" to navigate to targets along familiar routes and "survey knowledge" to determine (by pointing, for example) a target's metric location. We show that both root in separate memories of the same environment: participants navigating through their home city relied on representations and reference frames different from those they used when doing a matched survey task. Tübingen residents recalled their way along a familiar route to a distant target while located in a photorealistic virtual 3D model of Tübingen, indicating their route decisions on a keyboard.

The language of landmarks: the role of background knowledge in indoor wayfinding.

To effectively wayfind through unfamiliar buildings, humans infer their relative position to target locations not only by interpreting geometric layouts, especially length of line of sight, but also by using background knowledge to evaluate landmarks with respect to their probable spatial relation to a target. Questionnaire results revealed that participants have consistent background knowledge about the relative position of target locations. Landmarks were rated significantly differently with respect to their spatial relation to targets.

Is the map in our head oriented north?

We examined how a highly familiar environmental space--one's city of residence--is represented in memory. Twenty-six participants faced a photo-realistic virtual model of their hometown and completed a task in which they pointed to familiar target locations from various orientations. Each participant's performance was most accurate when he or she was facing north, and errors increased as participants' deviation from a north-facing orientation increased.