Alcock, M., Wiener, J. M. and Hardman, D, 2024. Searching in an unfamiliar environment: a phenomenologically informed experiment. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. (In Press)
Full text available as:
|
PDF (OPEN ACCESS ARTILE)
s11097-024-09960-3.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. 1MB | |
Copyright to original material in this document is with the original owner(s). Access to this content through BURO is granted on condition that you use it only for research, scholarly or other non-commercial purposes. If you wish to use it for any other purposes, you must contact BU via BURO@bournemouth.ac.uk. Any third party copyright material in this document remains the property of its respective owner(s). BU grants no licence for further use of that third party material. |
DOI: 10.1007/s11097-024-09960-3
Abstract
Wayfinding is generally understood as the process of purposefully navigating to distant and non-visible destinations. Within this broad framework, uninformed searching entails finding one’s way to a target destination, in an unfamiliar environment, with no knowledge of its location. Although a variety of search strategies have been previously reported, this research was largely conducted in the laboratory or virtual environments using simplistic and often non-realistic situations, raising questions about its ecological validity. In this study, we explored how extant findings on searching translate to a real-world environment, using a phenomenologically informed experiment. Our findings demonstrate a previously undescribed complex and dynamic interplay of different search strategies. Importantly, our results reveal that: (i) the presence of other people is importantly entangled with the process of searching; and (ii) people frequently probe and switch between search strategies based on local environmental characteristics. Together, our results reveal that search behaviour is critically dependent on environmental features and that searching in complex real-world settings should not be conceptualised as depending on a simple singular strategy. This raises questions about the dominance of laboratory-based experiments and their narrow cognitivist framework, highlighting the value of studying wayfinding in the real world.
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
ISSN: | 1568-7759 |
Uncontrolled Keywords: | Search task; Real-world environment; Wayfinding; Mixed-methods |
Group: | Faculty of Science & Technology |
ID Code: | 39487 |
Deposited By: | Symplectic RT2 |
Deposited On: | 07 Feb 2024 14:05 |
Last Modified: | 07 Feb 2024 14:05 |
Downloads
Downloads per month over past year
Repository Staff Only - |