Direction giving and following in the service of wayfinding in a complex indoor environment

We examined how sense of direction, descriptive feature content, and gender relate to direction giving and following during wayfinding in a complex indoor environment. In Experiment 1, participants provided directions to destinations. Participants with a good sense of direction provided more distances, marginally more correct descriptions, and marginally fewer straight references than those with a poor sense of direction. In Experiment 2, participants rated the effectiveness of these directions. Directions that were rated highly contained more descriptive features than did directions that were rated less highly. In open-ended responses, positive mentions of landmarks and negative mentions of cardinal descriptors were frequent. In Experiment 3, participants navigated faster when following the worst-rated directions than when following the best-rated directions.