Assessing the Influence of Landmarks and Paths on the Navigational Efficiency and the Cognitive Load of Indoor Maps

The aim of this study was to investigate whether different expressions of landmarks and paths have different influences on the navigational efficiency and the cognitive load of indoor maps. The study tested 80 subjects by indoor path discovery experiments and measured their cognitive loads with the Cooper−Harper scale. According to the results, we extracted some key landmarks from all landmarks of the experimental indoor map and evaluated the saliency degree of each path. Then, the study tested subjects with four different types of experimental indoor maps by path-recognition tasks. The results showed that maps with key landmarks are more effective in terms of navigation than those with full landmarks, but there were no significant differences between their cognitive loads. Maps with highlighted paths are more effective in terms of navigation, and their cognitive loads are much lower than those without highlighted paths. In addition, this study found that women's cognitive loads were more affected by key landmarks compared with men’s, while highlighted paths had no significant differences in terms of navigational efficiency and the cognitive load between males and females. Implications of these results with respect to the optimization strategies of indoor map designs are discussed.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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