Cognitive Aspects: How People Perceive, Memorize, Think and Talk About Landmarks - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 50

either landmark monitoring (e.g., for piloting) or landmark-movement memory
(e.g., for path integration) are required. Steck and Mallot studied preferences
for local or distant landmarks in visual navigation (piloting) [ 204 ] . Their results
indicate that people use both in navigation, but individuals show preferences for
one or the other, or use different types in particular locations. Golledge, studying
human wayfinding behavior [ 67 ] , observed the following route choice criteria most
frequently: shortest route , quickest route , route of fewest turns , most aesthetic route ,
first noticed route ,and longest-leg-first route . Perhaps not surprisingly, all of these
criteria are linked to landmarks. Further evidence shows that distance estimates
(in space or time) are correlated with the number of landmarks encountered along
the route [ 182 , 183 , 214 ] . Accordingly, route choice can be distorted. The route of
fewest turns is the one with the least cognitive load of landmarks in short term
memory. The most aesthetic route could be the one passing a number of landmarks.
The first noticed route may stand out as leading along the landmarks of strongest
salience. The longest-leg-first route starts out with a single landmark ahead, such
that more details can be loaded to short term memory later.
Siegel and White's influential three tiers cover only the knowledge gained from
first-hand experience of an environment. But not even novices will enter an unknown
environment with blank minds. They will be equipped with some strategic proce-
dural knowledge gained from experiences of other environments. Such knowledge
concerns default expectations about the structure of the environment, and enables
already the application of rules or strategies for orientation and wayfinding. For
example, first-time tourists to Paris may search for Notre Dame somewhere in the
center of the city, just because all the cathedrals they know of are in city centers.
These orientation and wayfinding strategies are heuristics. Generally, heuristics
are experience-based techniques for problem solving designed to avoid exhaustive
search. In orientation and wayfinding exhaustive search can be extremely costly, and
accordingly a number of heuristics have been learned and ingrained in wayfinding
behavior. However, since these heuristics are based on experiences from other
environments it is not guaranteed that they lead to an optimal solution. Jumping
on a bus in front of the arrival hall at Charles de Gaulle airport that promises to go
to a central city station might be a valid heuristic, but it is less optimal than taking
the local train RER B to Saint-Rémy lès Chevreuse, which stops at Notre Dame
after about 38 min.
One of these ingrained strategies is a piloting strategy in the urban maze, least
angle first . Knowing the direction to a target landmark, for example a sighted church
tower, a person will dive into the maze and choose at each intersection the street
segment deviating by the least angle from the (now estimated) direction to the
target [ 85 , 86 ] . As a piloting strategy this heuristics is heavily relying on a landmark.
However, also survey knowledge can be used in heuristics. For example, longest leg
first on network-like survey knowledge may be interpreted as a heuristic strategy to
identify a shortest route or a route of fewest turns. Finding a long leg has not only
strong correlations with shortest connections or few turns, it also may be cognitively
cheaper to process than the other two, or is more robust (for the complexity of
computing the shortest, quickest or simplest routes see, e.g., [ 42 , 45 , 133 ] ).