A Profile of Drivers' Map-Reading Abilities

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Abstract
To create better aids for everyday surface navigation, people's navigational preferences, habits, experiences, abilities, and route-selection strategies were examined. Self-described good navigators like and use maps, and they differentially value landmarks, such as rivers, railroads, and houses, whereas poor navigators tend not to use maps, prefer verbal instructions, and tend to rate all landmarks as equally valuable for route finding. Routes selected by people with varying degrees of familiarity with an area were compared with routes generated by standard graph-search procedures. A shortest-path, breadth-first route characterized half of the "expert" routes, whereas none of the graph-search procedures matched "intermediate" and "novice" routes. A good predictor of whether people chose a particular road was whether the sum of A + B + C (where A equals the straight-line distance from the start to the road, B equals the distance traveled on the road, and C equals the straight-line distance from the departure point on the road to the destination) did not exceed the straight-line distance between start and destination by more than about 20%.

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