Abstract

We present an interdisciplinary approach to the investigation of strategies and heuristics reflecting the cognitive processes underlying human wayfinding. To achieve this, we symmetrically investigate navigation behavior and associated language. This novel approach combines two completely different and independent directions of research that complement each other naturally and necessarily, but which have seldom been directly combined so far. The current focus on wayfinding strategies and heuristics is a fairly new scientific goal both in behavioral and linguistic research areas; also, the methods of discourse analysis have rarely been directly adopted to systematically investigate parallels between natural discourse and navigation behavior. In this paper, we outline and motivate our approach and present first results gained in combined empirical investigation