Turn left where you felt unhappy: how affect influences landmark-based wayfinding

Abstract

The present work investigated the impact of affect in landmark-based wayfinding. We assumed that affect-laden landmarks improve wayfinding performance and have an impact on later landmark recognition. To investigate our hypotheses, we ran two experiments in a virtual maze. In Experiment 1, we investigated how affect-laden landmarks influence wayfinding and recognition in comparison with neutral landmarks. The aim of Experiment 2 was to focus on the affective valence of a landmark. The memory tasks of both experiments were repeated after 1 week in order to assess memory consolidation. Results showed that the best wayfinding and recognition performance occurs when negatively laden landmarks were used. In comparison with neutral and positively laden landmarks, recognition performance hardly decreased over time for the negatively laden landmarks. Our results not only support findings in the field of emotion research but also expand the concept of semantic landmark salience with respect to emotional responses.

The Role of Emotional Landmarks on Topographical Memory

“…Firstly, results showed that positive and negative emotional landmarks facilitated the learning of the eight-square path as compared to neutral emotional landmarks, confirming, and extending Balaban et al’s (2017) study, that revealed the key role only of negative emotional landmarks on remembering paths in virtual environments. Contrarily to Balaban et al’s (2017) study, neutral landmarks were selected with low arousal, whereas both positive and negative emotional landmarks were selected with high arousal.…”

“…Contrarily to Balaban et al’s (2017) study, neutral landmarks were selected with low arousal, whereas both positive and negative emotional landmarks were selected with high arousal. Different studies showed that memory performance is affected by the level of arousal of stimuli, that is high arousal items are better remembered than low arousal items (e.g., Bradley et al, 1992); in addition, arousal was found to enhance memory for high priority information (Mather and Sutherland, 2011).…”

“…In addition, landmarks can also be emotionally loaded (Balaban et al, 2017), enhancing (positively or negatively) the ability to construct a cognitive map. In other words, the emotional salience of the landmark rather than the individual’s emotional state can be relevant as an aid for navigation.…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, using virtual environments only Balaban et al (2017) specifically investigated the role of affect-laden landmarks on wayfinding and recognition with respect to neutral landmarks. Results showed that negatively laden landmarks led to better wayfinding and recognition performance than neutral and positively laden landmarks.…”

“…Furthermore, they found that negative associations are better remembered over time than positive and neutral associations. According to Balaban et al (2017), the affective valence of the landmarks enhances wayfinding performance.…”