ABSTRACT
Many people have problems nding their way around public buildings such as airports, hospitals, ofces, or university buildings. The problem may partially lie in their spatiocognitive abilities, but also in the architecture. Orientation and movement round the building facilitate waynding. We dene waynding as “the information-gathering and decision-making processes that people use to orient themselves ad move through space; how people get from one place to another” (Billger 2000). Waynding can be implemented in different ways and using different strategies. Three specic strategies for navigation in multilevel buildings were compared in the work of Holscher et al. (2006). The central point strategy relies on well-known parts of the building; the direction strategy relies on routes that rst head towards the horizontal position of the goal, while the oor strategy relies on routes that rst head towards the vertical position of the goal. In the work of Holscher et al. (2009), it was tested whether the standard wall-mounted oor maps found in the majority of public buildings can help to navigate in a complex unknown environment. The types of descriptive features contained in waynding descriptions-sense of direction, waynding strategies, and gender-relate to waynding in an everyday, indoor environment were studied by Hund and Padgitt (2010). Those with a good sense of direction showed better waynding performance than those with a poor sense of direction.
