Route Learning Strategies in a Virtual Cluttered Environment

Here we present an experiment investigating human route learning behavior. Specific interest concerned the learning strategies as well as the underlying spatial knowledge. In the experiment naive participants were asked to learn a path between two locations in a complex, cluttered virtual environment that featured local and global landmark information. Participants were trained for several days until they solved the wayfinding task fastly and efficiently. The analysis of individual navigation behavior demontrates strong interindividual differences suggesting different route learning strategies: while some participants were very conservative in their route choices, always selecting the same route, other participants showed a high variability in their route choices. In the subsequent test phase we systematically varied the availability of local and global landmark information to gain first insights into the spatial knowledge underlying these different behavior. Participants showing high variability in route choices strongly depended on global landmark information. Moreover, participants who were conservative in their route choices were able to reproduce the basic form of the learned routes even without any local landmark information, suggesting that their route memory contained metric information. The results of this study suggest two alternative strategies for solving route learning and wayfinding tasks that are reflected in the spatial knowledge aquired during learning.