Do people prefer a landmark route over a shortest route?

ABSTRACT

Landmarks play an important role in spatial cognition, and therefore should be considered as a part of pedestrian navigation. This research addressed the question of human preference for landmark routes that are generated based on landmarks over shortest-distance optimized routes. We investigated whether there are differences regarding navigation behavior, navigation satisfaction, route memorization, route communication, and route comparison between the shortest and the landmark route. We did not observe any differences for navigation behavior, route memorization, and route communication. We observed that for the landmark route the participants were significantly faster in reversing the route. Generally, we found out that the participants were more satisfied with the shortest route and preferred the shortest route. We found hints that this might result from environmental parameters, which seemed to have an impact on navigation satisfaction. Additionally, the participants perceived the routes to be longer than they really were.

KEYWORDS:

• Landmark route
• shortest route
• navigation satisfaction
• route memorization
• route communication
• route comparison

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for the time they put into the review, the valuable comments, and careful reading of the manuscript. We thank all the students of the project seminar ”Landmark Navigation” who acted as experimenters for the survey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

Additional information

Funding

No funding is reported for this study.