Infrastructure Engineering - Research Publications

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Considerations for Efficient Communication of Route Directions

Tomko, Mr Martin ; Winter, Dr Stephan ( 2006)

We can observe that people familiar with an environment give route directions of varying granularity to other locals. Such route directions are typically shorter than the turn based directions of current navigation services, and contain only references of high relevance to the wayfinder. Studying these route directions of varying granularity reveals that they are intended to be memorized, a property that requires a low cognitive workload of the wayfinder during their usage. The short-term memory span of humans imposes a limit on the amount and the structure of information communicated. We argue that route directions of varying granularity provide the means to respect these limits by efficient recoding.