The Role of Landmark Modality and Familiarity in Human Wayfinding

What characteristics constitute a "helpful" landmark for wayfinding and how are they represented in the human brain? Experiment 1 compared recognition and wayfinding performance for visual, verbal, and acoustic landmarks (animals) learned in our virtual environment SQUARELAND. Experiment 2 investigated landmark semantics, namely, famous versus unfamiliar buildings. The results showed that, first, the best recognition performance was observed for words (verbal condition) followed by sounds. Performance was worst for the pictorial landmark information. In the wayfinding phase, a similar level of performance was observed for all three modalities. Second, famous buildings were better recognized than unfamiliar ones, indicating a semantic influence. We conclude that nonvisual information may successfully constitute a landmark and discuss this within the context of current research on landmarks and human wayfinding.