Wayfinding Strategies in Behaviour and Language

 

Wiener, Jan and Thora Tenbrink (accepted). Traveling salesman problem: The human case. KI-Themenheft Cognition.

About the project:

The scientific goal of this research project is to develop an improved understanding of the strategies and heuristics reflecting the cognitive processes underlying human wayfinding by symmetrically investigating navigation behavior and associated language. This interdisciplinary approach combines two completely different and independent directions of research that complement each other naturally and necessarily, but which have seldom been directly combined so far. It transcends earlier approaches in two major ways: First, the juxtaposition of spatial behavior and language in targeted empirical research has not been addressed systematically across diverse wayfinding tasks in earlier research, in spite of the fact that language is often viewed as a window to cognition. Therefore, so far the nature of this relationship remains underspecified in a number of respects. Second, the current focus on wayfinding strategies and heuristics is a fairly new scientific goal both in behavioral and linguistic research areas;so far, most effort has been addressed to (behavioral and linguistic) performance, properties of spatial memory, or choice with respect to restricted tasks. An exception is the still fairly new tendency in (pragmatic) linguistics to focus increasingly on speakers’ strategies and choices in natural discourse;however, the methods of discourse analysis have rarely been directly adopted to systematically investigate parallels between natural discourse and navigation behavior.

Humans solve manifold wayfinding tasks efficiently on a daily basis, ranging from search and exploration in unfamiliar environments to complex route planning with multiple target locations in familiar environments. In many cases, such tasks are made explicit by linguistic communication or possibly by other media such as maps. With respect to predefined goals and paths in route directions, the interrelations between various representation media and their role in wayfinding processes have been investigated intensively in earlier research. However, other kinds of tasks and cognitive factors are less well explored. The basic assumption for this research project is that human wayfinding behavior and its linguistic expression are based on a complex and dynamic interplay of multiple cognitive components and processes, i.e. the cognitive architecture. Depending on the wayfinding task, these subcomponents play specific and identifiable roles in the generation of behavior; these are reflected in a number of ways in language production. In route planning, for example, wayfinding behavior is assumed to mainly depend on internal factors such as spatial memory and on planning processes, while wayfinding in unfamiliar environments is rather based on the perception of external features such as visuo-spatial properties of the environment, its structure, and on general search and exploration strategies. Consequently, for understanding the cognitive architecture and the specific strategies underlying human wayfinding, it is necessary to consider navigation behavior integratively with respect to the specific wayfinding task, spatial properties of environments, and participants’ knowledge. It is expected that each of these factors is reflected in the ways in which speakers express their wayfinding strategies linguistically, as research on a specific wayfinding task, namely the generation of route directions, has already successfully shown.

In a series of wayfinding experiments in virtual environments, factors potentially influencing humans’ wayfinding behavior will be varied systematically. Comparisons of navigation and language data to generic abstract representations of environments, participants’ knowledge, and wayfinding task will allow the inference of mechanisms, strategies, and heuristics underlying human wayfinding behavior. Each behavioral experiment will be mirrored by an experiment involving a linguistic description of the task and its solution, enabling us to compare spontaneously produced language to the findings obtained for navigation behavior. The linguistic data will be analyzed using methods of cognitively motivated discourse analysis. Based on the empirical findings, hypotheses about the use, function, and interplay of cognitive components and processes involved in specific wayfinding tasks will be developed. The linguistic expression of these processes will be highlighted, providing significant new insights on the relation between cognition and language.