CSLI Coglunch: Ariane Tom, "Contrasting street- and landmark-based directions in wayfinding, production, and memory tasks"

comprehension has shown a great interest for spatial discourse. This

type of discourse can be seen as a means of externalizing the

interactions between two distinct systems in the human cognitive

architecture, namely the system of spatial representations and the

system of verbal representations. More specifically, many studies

aimed at understanding how people produce and comprehend route

directions.

There's a consensus on the importance of landmarks in the

production and comprehension of route directions; nonetheless, if the

to-be-described route is situated in a city, the information given can

be either based on street names or on landmarks. These two modes of

guiding a moving person may be unequally efficient, or even impose

different amounts of cognitive load during their processing, resulting

in a poorer memory of the route.

The series of experiments we conducted attempted to give the first

results on this issue, by combining both real world wayfinding tasks

and lab experiments. Results we'll report all converge on the better

efficiency of landmarks.

About the Speaker: Ariane Tom is a visiting scholar in the Stanford

Psychology Department.