Wayfinding task and cognition for pedestrians while walking

Wayfinding is defined as “the process of determining and following a path or route between an origin and destination” (Lynch, 1960; Golledge, 1992, 1999). Wayfinding is something people encounter very often in their day to day life. Humans solve wayfinding tasks such as search, exploration, route following, or route planning in contexts including outdoor and urban environments, indoor spaces and virtual reality simulations (Wiener et al., 2009). The main aspects of human wayfinding for a person is knowing where they are, where they wish to go and the way they need to take to get to that place.

To do this, humans use previously acquired knowledge of the route, and also their own spatial awareness and ability to tackle such tasks in the real-world. Siegel and White described three stages in acquiring wayfinding knowledge (Siegel and White, 1975):

• identification of landmarks,

• forming procedural route knowledge, formed when travelling between two land-marks, and

• forming structural survey knowledge, which is equivalent to inferring a map.

An individual’s sense of direction could be important to all of these methods. Cornell et al. states that a person with a good sense of direction may be better able to look for areas likely to contain landmarks and can use that information to direct actions at intersections on routes (Cornell et al., 2003). They add that this is possible as a good sense of direction can provide a reliable reference bearing when an individual is registering the degree of a turn. Use of visual interfaces will take away the ability (or makes it difficult) to notice landmarks along the path and update one’s cognitive map. This will hamper the orientation ability based on their mental representation of a configuration of landmarks to match the scene they are viewing even though they have a good sense of direction.

A person’s cognitive map, or knowledge of large-scale space, is built up from observations gathered as he travels through the environment. It acts as a problem solver to find routes and relative positions as well as describing the current location (Kuipers, 1978).

Depending on the modes of information available to humans and by considerations of efficiency and aesthetics, they are capable of using a variety of methods for wayfinding (Golledge, 1999). Wickens in the Multiple Response Theory (MRT) illustrates how different tasks will need to tap into similar resources (Wickens, 1992). Wickens adds that cognitive resources are limited and a supply and demand problem occurs when the individual performs two or more tasks that require a single resource. A typical example here is using vision for mobile services providing navigation and the actual physical task of walking to avoid obstacles (including physical objects and other incoming pedestrians along the way).

Context can be defined as “the set of environmental states and settings that either determines an application’s behaviour or in which an application event occurs and is interesting to the user” (Chen and Kotz, 2000). Chen and Kotz defined two classes of context-aware computing: active and passive, in which the first influences the behaviour of an application by automatically adapting to the discovered context. By passive context awareness they mean that an application presents new or updated contexts to an interested user or makes the context persistent, enabling the user to retrieve and use

Figure 56: Use of signboards to: a) provide users with directional information towards landmarks and b) provide distance information along with direction.

it later. The use of various interaction techniques providing directional information to the user can be used to help the user integrate such systems into their day-today lives.

Mobile Spatial Interaction techniques and presentation of such information on mobile terminals with fairly small screen size was and still is a big challenge. The need to ensure that the user can also attend to other tasks while on the move and using such location based services is also important. A major goal is to minimize user interaction through service adaptation, and to provide context-sensitive and personalized information to the user (Raubal and Winter, 2002). Krum et al. adds that most of the issues regarding use of geo-spatial applications require revised approaches to interaction design (Krum et al., 2007). However once these applications are designed, keeping in mind that the interaction and use of this system are secondary tasks, more people will integrate such systems into their day-to-day lives.

The use of direction information in signage at road intersections has been used in various places over the years to give the user a sense of direction towards his/her destination.

Some provide only direction information whereas others provide distance information along with direction (Figure 56). This helps the user re-orient and head along the direc-tion required to reach their destinadirec-tion. Sweeney Research describes the road signage for pedestrians to cater for both micro-minded and macro-minded pedestrians (Sweeney Research, 2010). Micro-minded pedestrians are those who prefer prompting and con-tinual guidance required for reassurance and security; Macro-minded pedestrians looks for detail required for empowerment and knowledge. This kind of information used for road signage can be incorporated into mobile devices providing pedestrian navigation services. For pedestrians with a macro-mindset, visual interfaces on mobile devices are suitable for providing information like detailed street maps, contextual maps, pictogram, street names, public transport and landmarks. For pedestrians with a micro-mindset, non-visual interaction techniques can be more useful for providing information like con-tinuous directional information, information about arrival at an important waypoint or landmark, and low level information like distance information (e.g.: near, far or very far). When we develop a mobile wayfinding system we should cater to both the macro and micro-mindset.

Stark et al. adds that the degree of freedom in pedestrian movement is one of the most important features as pedestrians are not constrained (and would not like to be) to the road network (following car lanes, road restrictions and so on) unlike drivers (Stark et al., 2007). Apart from paved walkways, there are other walking areas such as grasslands, parks and open ground where pedestrians can walk freely and are not constrained to following a fixed path. They also add that new path finding algorithms and route following pedestrian navigation systems must be used to help pedestrians while also considering the degree of freedom in pedestrian movements.