The effect of navigational expertise on wayfinding in new environments

Abstract

Becoming proficient at navigation in urban environments is something that we all aspire to. Here we asked whether being an expert at wayfinding in one environment has any effect on learning new spatial layouts. Licensed London taxi drivers are among the most proficient urban navigators, training for many years to find their way around a complex and irregularly-laid out city. We first tested how well they could learn the layout of an unfamiliar town compared with a group of non-taxi drivers. Second, we investigated how effectively taxi drivers could integrate a new district into their existing spatial representation of London. We found that taxi drivers were significantly better than control participants at executing routes through the new town, and representing it at a map-like survey level. However, the benefits of navigational expertise were not universal. Compared with their performance in the new town, taxi drivers were significantly poorer at learning the layout of a new area that had to be integrated with their existing knowledge of London. We consider reasons for this picture of facilitation and limitation, in particular drawing parallels with how knowledge acquisition occurs in the context of expertise in general.

Multilevel Integration Entropies: The Case of Reconstruction of Structural Quasi-Stability in Building Complex Datasets

“…Here, the calculations of comparisons between multi-level integration entropies suggest that the taxi driver's behavior is repetitive; hence, in accordance with the results of the recent study [70], the taxi drivers' learning of new spatial information with respect to the existing knowledge is rather poor. Nevertheless, in the context of datasets related to taxi drivers, the application will be extended to the larger group of taxi drivers, in the course of addressing the issues related to discovering the patterns of human mobility in an urban area [64,65].…”

Review of expertise and its general implications for correctional psychology and criminology

“…This supports the idea that new features can be integrated into schemas quickly in those experienced at a task and that skills/knowledge can be built up quickly without repetitions in identical environments. This works well up to a point where too much new information has to be integrated (see Woollett & Maguire, 2010 later in this article).…”

“…In a body of work, Maguire and her colleagues have found neural correlates which suggest a two-track system in the brain for dealing with well-learned routes and novel routes in expert London taxi-drivers -individuals who have to continually integrate novel features with well-learned ones when finding new routes on a daily basis (e.g. Hartley, Maguire, Spiers, & Burgess, 2003 p 673;Woollett & Maguire, 2010). Novel routes appear to activate the anterior hippocampus, while well-known routes activate the caudate nucleus.…”

“…London taxi drivers were significantly superior to novices in applying their expert navigational strategies in learning to navigate a completely new area outside London (like burglars going to a new residential area, with new but architecturally familiar housing). But when asked to learn notable deviations to routes they already knew in London (over half of the stimuli were new -like burglars entering what seems like a familiar property-type but finding something radically different inside), it took them longer than the novice group (Woollett & Maguire, 2010). According to the authors, the taxi drivers' existing schemas which had been automatically invoked by the familiar information, no longer functioned under the weight of new information, but nevertheless could not be inhibited, and competed with attempts to use new strategies to integrate this new information, rendering them slower than the novices.…”

Gardony Map Drawing Analyzer: Software for quantitative analysis of sketch maps

“…Others could determine important map features and hand-score them using carefully designed rubrics (Brunyé & Taylor, 2008a, b). This approach may involve counting missing route segments and wrong turns (Hegarty, Montello, Richardson, Ishikawa, & Lovelace, 2006) or using Likert scales to rate road and layout orientation (Woollett & Maguire, 2010). On the surface, these approaches appear to incorporate quantitative approaches, but they have severe limitations.…”