Cognitive Aspects: How People Perceive, Memorize, Think and Talk About Landmarks - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 46

In other experiments with human participants, spatial coordination can be tested,
such as catching a ball or predicting where a ball that is temporarily obscured
by an object will reappear; orientation tasks can involve maintaining a sense for
a reference direction during locomotion; wayfinding tasks can involve realizing a
symbolic or verbal route description or exploring an unknown environment; and
spatial communication tasks can involve providing such route descriptions.

3.1.2 Orientation and Wayfinding

How to get from here to there is certainly a fundamental planning ability of any
animal, humans included. Montello and Raubal ranked wayfinding as the most
important function of spatial cognition [ 151 ] . Aspects of wayfinding have already
been mentioned, such as the homing ability based on path integration. Let us search
for a more systematic understanding of this task of spatial cognition.
Montello [ 149 ] identified wayfinding as a component of navigation .Hedefines
navigation as goal-directed movement of one's self through an environment to find
a distal destination. However, splitting navigation into components does not happen
along clear lines. While Montello proposes to split into locomotion and wayfinding
(p. 258), Waller and Nadel see wayfinding as agglomerate of a suite of cognitive
abilities such as place memory, imagery and planning [ 231 ] . Wang and Spelke [ 233 ]
suggest to isolate a third component in between locomotion and wayfinding, spatial
orientation . Let us take a closer look at these three components of navigation.
In this topic we apply Montello's notion of wayfinding, which has also been
adopted elsewhere (e.g., [ 12 , 61 , 66 , 77 ] ). It involves several abilities:

Wayfinding comprises the tactical and strategic part of solving the problem to
find a distal destination.

Allen [ 3 ] attempted a classification of types of wayfinding tasks. He distin-
guished wayfinding through familiar environments (he calls this type commute ),
through or into unfamiliar environments for the purpose of learning the environment
( explore ), and through or into unfamiliar environments to reach a destination
known to exist ( quest ). Wayfinding of a commute type accesses an existing mental
spatial representation. Exploring, in contrast, will contribute to a mental spatial
representation. For questing, as Allen writes, “the only way in which a previously
unknown place becomes a wayfinding destination is for knowledge of that place
to be conveyed symbolically, but means of either a map or verbal descriptions”
(p. 555). To what extent this questing contributes to mental spatial representations
seems to vary in different contexts. Recent studies indicate that car drivers relying
on their car navigation system put less effort into adding to their mental spatial