Impact of environmental color and instruction on wayfinding in humans

Abstract

Abstract Researchers believe that wayfinding and landmark identification can be enhanced using route instruction and a bird's eye view. It remains an open question whether a bird's eye view or a route instruction would reduce cognitive load in spatial landmark identification. In addition, the effect of environmental colour on human landmark identification during navigation is unclear. The study was conducted with a Virtual environmental (VE) paradigm, and Sixty-six college students (46 males and 20 females) between the ages of 18–35 years volunteered as participants. Participants were randomly assigned to four groups (Instruction- Bird's eye, Instruction- No Bird's eye, No Instruction- Bird's eye, and No Instruction - No Bird's eye). The results of the independent between-group ANOVA yielded a statistically significant effect, F (3, 56) = 3.75, p = 0.01, η2 = 0.16 on coloured environmental conditions. Compared to the B/W condition, coloured environments support landmark identification only in the initial stages of wayfinding. Moreover, the visual trajectory analysis indicates that the number of deviations in the shortest route is less in B/W conditions than in coloured conditions. The study results demonstrated the importance of route instruction on landmark identification under coloured and B/W environments. The results also indicate that the wayfinding time can be reduced by providing clear route instructions in a declarative format.