ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on spatial mental representations and explores navigational confusion and uncertainty, likely arising from an incomplete mental representation. It examines a behavioral indicator of navigational confusion, tying it to wayfinding outcomes. The chapter argues that navigation performance is optimized when environment knowledge allows one to effectively problem solve within a known environment. It demonstrates that even very early in a navigation task, heading entropy robustly predicts navigation path efficiency. The chapter proposes that heading entropy indicates transient states of disorientation and disorganized looking behavior in an attempt to gather the information needed to inform decisions. it discusses a potential method and proof-of-concept study for identifying disorientation. The chapter also proposes that entropy in a user's heading direction may indicate transient disorientation. When a user becomes lost they may similarly exhibit behaviors that indicate, and bi-directionally influence, their transient states of increased cognitive workload associated with disorientation.
