A Comparison of the Serial Order Strategy and the Associative Cue Strategy for Decision Making in Wayfinding Tasks

Abstract

It has been proposed that in wayfinding, humans can use multiple strategies to decide which direction to take at intersections. One of them is the serial order strategy, where travelers memorize the order in which those directions should be taken. Another is the associative cue strategy, where travelers memorize associations between conspicuous objects along the way, and the directions to take. We designed tasks in which participants had to base their decisions on the serial order strategy (task S), on the associative cue strategy (task A), or were free to use either of those strategies (task SA). We found that performance errors decreased with practice in all three tasks but were higher in A than in S and SA. We conclude that in our study, the serial order strategy was more efficient than the paired associate strategy. We further conclude that this outcome is likely to depend on task demand, which calls for additional research that varies not only the available strategies, but also the task demand.

Keywords

• wayfinding
• navigation
• route knowledge
• spatial cognition
• spatial learning