Seeing Beyond Your Visual Field

Abstract

Previous research has suggested that the layout of urban spaces can have a substantial influence on how people navigate through those spaces. However, to date, few studies have directly investigated how changes in layout interact with changes in visual field to shape a person's route choice. Across two experiments, the influence of visual field and spatial layout was manipulated using virtual reality. It was found that route choice was significantly influenced by the configuration of a space-The more consistently organized environment led to more systematic route choices. However, limiting the perception of distant visual information was found to influence route choice in a similar but completely independent way. These findings suggest that navigation in urban spaces is dependent on the interaction between topology and the visual features of the space, where greater visual field and a consistently organized spatial layout lead to maximally efficient route choices.

Complexity As Key to Designing Cognitive-Friendly Environments for Older People

“…Moreover, complex topology has been associated with reduced visual sampling in older patients with Parkinson’s Disease, when navigating environments with turning points rather than straight paths (Galna et al, 2012). In line with this evidence, Barton et al (2014) found impaired navigation skills (measured in terms of speed and accuracy in reaching a target) in environments with low intelligibility, which they operationalized as the correlation of connectivity (the number of potential routes connected to a specific path in a network) and integration (the average number of turns required to change path in the network). The results were independent of familiarity with the environment or accessibility to visual information.…”

Psychiatric Institutions and the Physical Environment: Combining Medical Architecture Methodologies and Architectural Morphology to Increase Our Understanding

“…This could be interpreted as inadequacy of Space Syntax to cover complex multiparametric settings—especially as Space Syntax takes a minimal number of parameters into account—but also could mean that psychiatric facilities are still what Goffman named “total institutions” [79]. At the same time, it highlights considerable limitations of Space Syntax algorithms when it comes to healthcare facilities [80–82] or when the research population is not normative [83, 84].…”

Do environmental characteristics predict spatial memory about unfamiliar environments?

“…Space Syntax is an architectural analytic tool that has been leveraged not only by architects, but also by other scientists (including cognitive scientists, psychologists, and geographers) to investigate the relationship between properties of space and human behavior in it (Barton, Valtchanov & Ellard, 2014;Dalton, Hölscher & Turner, 2012;Emo, Al-Sayed & Varoudis, 2016;Hillier & Hanson, 1984;Hillier & Vaughan, 2007;Kim & Penn, 2004;Li & Klippel, 2016;Nubani & Wineman, 2005;Penn, 2003;Peponis, Ross & Rashid, 1997). In the present study, we examine how well measures derived from two popular Space Syntax techniques-the Axial Map Analysis and the Visibility Graph Analysis (VGA)predict performance in spatial memory tasks following navigation of a virtual environment.…”