Route effects in city-based survey knowledge estimates

When studying wayfinding in urban environments, researchers are often interested in obtaining measures of participants' survey knowledge, i.e., their estimate of distant locations relative to other places. Previous work showed that distance estimations are consistently biased when no direct route is available to the queried target or when participants follow a detour. Here we investigated whether a corresponding bias is manifested in two other popular measures of survey knowledge: a pointing task and a sketchmapping task. The aim of this study was to investigate whether there is a systematic bias in pointing/sketchmapping performance associated with the preferred route choice in an applied urban setting. The results were mixed. We found moderate evidence for the presence of a systematic bias, but only for a subset of urban locations. When two plausible routes to the target were available, survey knowledge estimates were significantly biased in the direction of the route chosen by the participant. When only one plausible route was available, we did not find a statistically significant pattern. The results may have methodological implications for spatial cognition studies in applied urban settings that might be obtaining systematically biased survey knowledge estimates at some urban locations. Researchers should be aware that the choice of urban locations from which pointing and sketchmapping are performed might systematically distort the results, in particular when two plausible but diverging routes to the target are visible from the location.

Evaluating schematic route maps in wayfinding tasks for in-car navigation

Today's navigation systems use topographic maps to communicate route information. Being general-purpose maps, topographic maps lack optimal support for the specific task of route reading and navigation. In the public transportation domain, research demonstrated that topographic maps do not support planning of routes as good as schematic maps. Our current paper applies this idea to the domain of in-car navigation. Schematic maps emphasize functional aspects of geography and direction information by highlighting information relevant to navigation actions and orientation. However, there is a lack of systematic studies researching the usability of schematic cartography in wayfinding tasks. This article evaluates schematic route maps, created with an algorithm developed in our previous work, regarding user interaction, navigation performance, and spatial memorability. We compare these schematic maps with correspondent non-schematic ones in two different tasks: prospective and situated (driving simulator) route reading. The schematic map and the corresponding non-schematic map are identical in terms of their elements and topology; they vary only in their geometric shape: on the schematic maps, features are highly generalized, following schematic simplification rules for clarity. The experimental data shows that participants using the schematic route maps require fewer map interactions to complete the tasks, orientation information is more visible and leads to more accurate spatial knowledge acquisition. This result contributes to a better understanding of schematic route visualizations' benefits to support users in wayfinding and orientation tasks.

The effect of navigation method and visual display on distance perception in a large-scale virtual building

Immersive virtual reality (VR) technology has become a popular method for fundamental and applied spatial cognition research. One challenge researchers face is emulating walking in a large-scale virtual space although the user is in fact in a small physical space. To address this, a variety of movement interfaces in VR have been proposed, from traditional joysticks to teleportation and omnidirectional treadmills. These movement methods tap into different mental processes of spatial learning during navigation, but their impacts on distance perception remain unclear. In this paper, we investigated the role of visual display, proprioception, and optic flow on distance perception in a large-scale building by manipulating four different movement methods. Eighty participants either walked in a real building, or moved through its virtual replica using one of three movement methods: VR-treadmill, VR-touchpad, and VR-teleportation. Results revealed that, first, visual display played a major role in both perceived and traversed distance estimates but did not impact environmental distance estimates. Second, proprioception and optic flow did not impact the overall accuracy of distance perception, but having only an intermittent optic flow (in the VR-teleportation movement method) impaired the precision of traversed distance estimates. In conclusion, movement method plays a significant role in distance perception but does not impact the configurational knowledge learned in a large-scale real and virtual building, and the VR-touchpad movement method provides an effective interface for navigation in VR.

How the Visitors' Cognitive Engagement Is Driven (but Not Dictated) by the Visibility and Co-visibility of Art Exhibits

The spatial arrangement of artworks is recognized as one of the key elements of exhibition design. The underlying assumption is that the layout can strengthen the impact of individual exhibits, because the way visitors visually engage with artworks affects how they are cognitively processed. This paper explores the influence of the exhibits’ visual properties on the visitors’ attention and their memory of artworks. Attention was recorded with the use of mobile eye-tracking and memory was measured by an unanticipated recognition test immediately after the visit. The paper analyses both the total amount of attention spent on interacting with each artwork, as well as the strategy through which attention was allocated: through primarily longer (“diligent”) looks, versus primarily shorter (“distracted”) glimpses. Results of two experiments demonstrate that the visibility and co-visibility of artworks affected the amount of attention allocated to them, and the strategy of attention allocation. While the amount of attention contributed to improving the recognition memory of pictures, the strategy of attention allocation did not. These findings demonstrate the power of the exhibition’s visual properties to influence the experience of museum visitors but also highlight the visitors’ ability to employ alternative viewing strategies without diminishing the cognitive processing of artworks.

Risk perception during urban cycling: An assessment of crowdsourced and authoritative data

Subjective risk perception during urban cycling has been mostly investigated through questionnaire studies. However, newly available data sources promise extended possibilities for the investigation and understanding of the underlying factors. We validate the rationale for using both opportunistically available crowd-sourced data (i.e., volunteered geographic information or VGI) as well as more established but rarely investigated authoritative data as predictors of subjective cycling risk. We achieve this by correlating indicators of cycling risk extracted from both VGI and authoritative data for two different German cities with participants' risk estimates assessed in laboratory-based virtual reality experiments. In Case 1, 15 participants (mostly undergraduate students with a mean age of 22 years old; nine of them females) were tested as a sample representing frequent and experienced cyclists, but unfamiliar with the 19 tested locations and less likely to be affected by the virtual reality setup. In Case 2, 24 new participants (mostly undergraduate students; mean age 24 years; 13 of them females) were experienced cyclists and mostly familiar with the 40 test locations located in their city of residence. For both cases, our findings provide evidence that parameters extracted from VGI (e.g., the semantic severity of the contribution and the reception by other citizens) as well as from authoritative data sources (e.g., accident statistics or Space Syntax measures) represent valid indicators for the subjectively perceived risk of cycling at a specific location. On the basis of this validation, future research can use these data sources to investigate the sources of risk perception during urban cycling in greater detail.