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Three experiments investigated the acquisition and retention of structural and object landmarks in virtual indoor environments. The experiments investigated the rate of acquisition and memory retention for hallway structure (structural landmarks) and pictures (object landmarks). The experiments investigated the rate of acquisition, the role of information content, and memory retention of this information when participants were trained and tested in novel virtual indoor environments. The results from these experiments suggest that (a) even initially, participants are biased toward encoding building structure over object landmarks; (b) participants are sensitive to the information content of landmarks and will allocate memory resources to landmarks that are more informative; and (c) information about these landmarks is retained even after a 1-year delay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors describe 3 human spatial navigation experiments that investigate how limitations of perception, memory, uncertainty, and decision strategy affect human spatial navigation performance. To better understand the effect of these variables on human navigation performance, the authors developed an ideal-navigator model for indoor navigation whose optimizing algorithm uses a partially observable Markov decision process. The model minimizes the number of actions (translations and rotations) required to move from an unknown starting state to a specific goal state in indoor environments that have perceptual ambiguity. The authors compared the model's performance with that of the human observer to measure human navigation efficiency. Experiment 1 investigated the effect of increasing the layout size on spatial way-finding efficiency and found that participants' efficiencies decreased as layout size increased. The authors investigated whether this reduction in navigation efficiency was due to visual perception (Experiment 2), memory, spatial updating strategy, or decision strategy (Experiment 3). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]