ABSTRACT
The structure of human spatial memory has been studied using a wide variety of experimental paradigms. This chapter presents several experiments that reveal an influence of environmental regions on human route planning behaviour. Furthermore it proposes a route planning heuristic that could account for the observed effects. Subjects navigated through virtual environments that were divided into different regions. Places within these environments could be identified by associated landmarks. After learning the environments subjects were asked to either find the shortest route to a single target-place or to find the shortest route for visiting three places in the environment. Motivated by the empirical findings, the chapter proposes a planning heuristic that uses both, coarse space information for the distant locations and fine space information for the close locations. By using spatial information at different levels of detail for current location and target location, the proposed planning mechanism is less computationally expensive than planning mechanisms that use detailed information solely.
