Human behaviour · 2021

From visible destinations to cognitive agents

Seeing a destination changes how people navigate between floors. In a desktop virtual-reality study, 69 participants complete repeated wayfinding tasks. Even limited destination visibility prompts movement towards it, while hidden destinations lead to more visual exploration. A cognitive agent that switches between exploration and goal pursuit according to visibility reproduces key behavioural patterns observed in the study.

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Plots compare humans, cognitive agents, and shortest-path agents using time to escalator, trajectory similarity, and spatial path-density maps. — Human wayfinding measurements and path distributions compared with cognitive and shortest-path agents.
Gath-Morad et al., Published article, Figure 5. Extracted from PDF page 8; page surroundings cropped; figure content unchanged. Source · CC BY 4.0.
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Journal article

Visibility matters during wayfinding in the vertical

Michal Gath-Morad, Tyler Thrash, Julia Schicker, Christoph Hölscher, Dirk Helbing, Leonel Enrique Aguilar Melgar

Scientific Reports · 2021

Summary based on Published article, PDF pages 1, 8, 9.

DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-98439-1