Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
7246732 Journal of Environmental Psychology 2010 12 Pages PDF
Abstract
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.
Related Topics
Social Sciences and Humanities Psychology Applied Psychology
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