UC Santa Barbara

The cognitive process of wayfinding is necessarily situated in a social world, whether someone is traveling with another person to a shared destination or interpreting the physical traces of others’ activities to direct their travel. Wayfinding involves integrating multiple sources of information about the environment, one of which is the direct or indirect influence of the social context. The presented work expands our understanding of human navigation as it unfolds in a social context. I investigate pedestrian navigation by pairs of people (both stranger dyads and friend dyads) as well as individuals in an unfamiliar, real-world environment. In three studies, participants were asked to plan and enact a route between a given origin and destination. Each dyad or individual first devised a route using a map of the environment, then was taken to the environment and asked to navigate to the destination from memory alone. I video-recorded participants during both planning and navigation, using Conversation Analysis (CA) for the evaluation of social interaction. The complexity of human behavior in groups calls for such interdisciplinary methods of inquiry and approaches to understanding.

With these studies I examine explanations for successful route planning, spatial and social strategies employed during wayfinding, and sources of uncertainty in navigation. This includes differences between situated and prospective planning—participants often collaboratively adapt their route-following on the fly based on unexpected challenges. This research contributes to the understanding of how people encode and coordinate their spatial knowledge to solve the important problem of navigating through the environment. It has further implications for the design of navigation aids, expanding what we know about the practices of multiple people working in conjunction on a wayfinding task.