Geography Reference
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individual's degree of feeling oriented. In order to reduce the amount of subjectivity
in the status of being oriented an individual should be able to externalize their
current relationships with their environment. An indirect indicator, however, is their
success with planning of goal-directed behavior in space.
The third component of navigation, locomotion, can be defined as follows:
Locomotion is the actual movement of the body coordinated to the proximal
surrounds.
The proximal surrounds can be described as the “environment directly accessible
to our sensory and motor systems at a given moment (or, at most, within a few
moments)” ( [ 149 ] , p. 259). Not all locomotion is part of an effort to find a distal
destination. Locomotion can happen in vista space, for example, moving from the
chair to the window, sitting at the table and leading the fork to the mouth, turning
to another person, or walking down the aisle. But in the context of navigation
locomotion is guided by a conscious plan, the wayfinding result.
Psychological experiments on wayfinding tend to focus on walking as the means
of movement. However, in the context of navigation the movement of the body can
be aided by vehicles. Riding a bike or a car still requires movement coordinated to
the proximal surrounds in a directed manner. Some of these aids, however, do not
require body movement at all. Sitting in a taxi or on a bus can be part of the strategy
to find a distal destination, but the only body movement involved is getting on or off
the vehicle.
Locomotion, orientation and wayfinding are inherently linked. While locomotion
follows a plan made by wayfinding, in return, orientation and wayfinding are
constantly informed by locomotion, or by the sensory perceptions during changing
of place or pose, and updated accordingly. For example, while sitting on a
bus, watching time and progress of the trip—cognitive activities supported by
perceptions—the decision to get off according to plan (or even updating a prior
plan) is triggering locomotion.
3.1.3
What We Have Learned About Landmarks
from Orientation and Wayfinding
The fundamental role of landmarks for orientation and wayfinding stems from a
strong correspondence between an experience captured in (spatial) memory and
a location in the physical environment. While we have defined landmarks as the
reference points of mental spatial representations, their corresponding physical
objects can be called landmarks only with regard to their potential to produce an
experience that will be captured in spatial memory.
 
 
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