This article presents an experiment in which route choice decisions made at road junctions are recorded. Such routes can be expressed as the sum of individual decisions made or potential decisions available throughout a journey. Relationships between these aggregate values are assessed statistically, indicating that participants’ decisions correlate more strongly with maximum angles of incidence of road center lines (leading from a junction) than to mean or minimum angles. One interpretation is that participants appear to be attempting to conserve linearity throughout their journey. However, informal observations of participants traversing urban grids cast doubt on the proposed theories of the conservation of angular linearity, requiring the theory’s modification. The resultant hypothesis combines principles of a conservation of linearity while also minimizing the angular difference between pairs of bearings; the key bearings are the directions of potential route choices and a perceived bearing of the wayfinding goal as judged from sequential instances of the observer’s location.

Virtual reality environments presented on tablets and smartphones have potential to aid the early diagnosis of conditions such as Alzheimer’s dementia by quantifying impairments in navigation performance. However, it is unclear whether performance on mobile devices can predict navigation errors in the real world. We compared the performance of 49 participants (25 females, 18-35 years old) at wayfinding and path integration tasks designed in our mobile app ‘Sea Hero Quest’ with their performance at similar tasks in a real-world environment. We first performed this experiment in the streets of London (UK) and replicated it in Paris (France). In both cities, we found a significant correlation between virtual and real-world wayfinding performance and a male advantage in both environments, although smaller in the real world (Cohen’s d in the game = 0.89, in the real world = 0.59). Results in London and Paris were highly similar, and controlling for familiarity with video games did not change the results. The strength of the correlation between real world and virtual environment increased with the difficulty of the virtual wayfinding task, indicating that Sea Hero Quest does not merely capture video gaming skills. The fact that the Sea Hero Quest wayfinding task has real-world ecological validity constitutes a step toward controllable, sensitive, safe, low-cost, and easy to administer digital cognitive assessment of navigation ability.

People often get lost in buildings, including but not limited to libraries, hospitals, conference centers, and shopping malls. There are at least three contributing factors: the spatial structure of the building, the cognitive maps that users construct as they navigate, and the strategies and spatial abilities of the building users. The goal of this article is to discuss recent research on each of these factors and to argue for an integrative framework that encompasses these factors and their intersections, focusing on the correspondence between the building and the cognitive map, the completeness of the cognitive map as a function of the strategies and individual abilities of the users, the compatibility between the building and the strategies and individual abilities of the users, and complexity that emerges from the intersection of all three factors. We end with an illustrative analysis in which we apply this integrative framework to difficulty in way-finding.

We discuss the important, but greatly under-researched, topic of the social aspects of human wayfinding during navigation. Wayfinding represents the planning and decision-making component of navigation and is arguably among the most common, real-world domains of both individual and group-level decision making. We highlight the myriad ways that wayfinding by people is not a solitary psychological process but is influenced by the actions of other people, even by their mere presence. We also present a novel and comprehensive framework for classifying wayfinding in complex environments that incorporates the influence of other people. This classification builds upon the premises of previous wayfinding taxonomies and is further structured into four parts based upon (1) the nature of the interaction between the actors and (2) the time frame in which the interaction takes place. We highlight gaps in our current understanding of social wayfinding and outline future research opportunities.