Periodic Reporting for period 2 - FamConMe (Familiarity is Key! Conceptualizing and Behaviourally Measuring Familiarity In-Situ)
Berichtszeitraum: 2023-09-01 bis 2024-08-31
This 30-month, highly interdisciplinary MSCA Global Fellowship was dedicated exclusively to the concept of spatial familiarity. Spatial familiarity is a state of spatial cognition which is acquired primarily (but not exclusively) by finding one’s own way through the environment. And, vice versa, spatial familiarity has a large impact on wayfinding itself with respect to both, reasoning about it and performance. Despite this support for the importance of familiarity, there is no generally agreed upon definition of it nor is there an agreement on how to assess it – which is a major research gap due to the evidence that both aspects are highly interrelated in empirical studies. The FamConMe project contributed significantly to the understanding and implementation of familiarity in geographic information systems, adding to our knowledge on how to conceptualize familiarity and providing ways to assess it in-situ based on behavioural data. The project’s focus was on understanding the conceptualization and measurement of spatial familiarity in human wayfinders so far; finding a way to assess a person’s sense of spatial familiarity at different levels and relate it to the person’s knowledge; predict the degree of a person’s spatial familiarity from eye and full-body movements during wayfinding. Beyond the theoretical advancement, the outcomes of this project are an important first step towards personalization of navigation systems. Continuously monitoring how familiar a person is provides one basis for a system to tailor route instructions specific to a user’s need. This improves the user experience of such systems and, even more importantly, helps to mitigate potentially adverse impacts navigation system use might have on our spatial orientation abilities.
The FamConMe project was divided into an outgoing phase of 18-months duration at UC Santa Barbara (USA) and a 12-month long incoming phase at TU Wien (Austria). In order to achieve a major theoretical and empirical advancement with respect to spatial familiarity in wayfinding, a three-step procedure was taken. First, a systematic review was conducted, covering literature from a broad range of domains; using a highly detailed coding scheme, a very large amount of papers was coded to disentangle the relationships among the various ways of how familiarity is conceptualized, measured, the research designs used, and the environments studied. Strengths and weaknesses of all these facets and important paths of future research were determined. To provide two examples: (1) While we found studies which use indoor as well as studies which use outdoor environments, the two settings are very infrequently combined. This limits our understanding of the role of spatial familiarity across environment transitions. (2) Familiarity is primarily used as independent variable, which means there is a wealth of research on the impact familiarity has. There are, however, hardly any studies, which use familiarity as a dependent variable, which results in a lack of understanding on how people acquire spatial familiarity while finding their way.
Second, an online study was designed and conducted to assess how familiar someone is with a place, an area or a route, studying these features simultaneously and as comparable as possible. This study used a a combination of knowledge tasks and self-report measures in order to understand how these different dimensions relate to each other. More than 200 people completed both sessions of this study. The results suggest that familiarity with different feature types are dependent on each other, stressing the importance for future research to assess familiarity with these features simultaneously. In addition to that, evidence is provided that knowledge about a feature impacts self-report familiarity but that they are yet distinct and that the degree of this impact varies for different geographical features. This stresses, for example, the importance to consider carefully how familiarity is measured when comparing findings across studies.
The outcomes of both steps informed the third step of the project during which a two-part real world study was designed and conducted. The primary goal of the study was to classify different levels of familiarity from full-body motion capture and eye movement data. The first part of the study was done online; during this part participants’ familiarity was assessed using a suitable subset of the online study tasks. During the real-world part, participants walked across UC Santa Barbara's campus while we recorded their eye movements, body motion, and location. Over 90 participants generated 4600+ minutes of behavioral data. This dataset is analyzed using both, qualitative and quantitative methods. A qualitative assessment was done in order to find out whether participant’s levels of familiarity can be distinguished based on the elements participants included in a sketch of the route they had taken through the environment. The results pave the way for a research agenda on how to further disentangle the multifaceted relationship of both phenomena. Given the feature richness of the collected behavior, an analysis framework for body and eye movement data was developed based on a less complex dataset collected in 2020. The results show that head movements could indicate familiarity with 96% accuracy using a head-mounted IMU. This framework is now applied to analyze the full-body motion capture dataset.
Second, an online study was designed and conducted to assess how familiar someone is with a place, an area or a route, studying these features simultaneously and as comparable as possible. This study used a a combination of knowledge tasks and self-report measures in order to understand how these different dimensions relate to each other. More than 200 people completed both sessions of this study. The results suggest that familiarity with different feature types are dependent on each other, stressing the importance for future research to assess familiarity with these features simultaneously. In addition to that, evidence is provided that knowledge about a feature impacts self-report familiarity but that they are yet distinct and that the degree of this impact varies for different geographical features. This stresses, for example, the importance to consider carefully how familiarity is measured when comparing findings across studies.
The outcomes of both steps informed the third step of the project during which a two-part real world study was designed and conducted. The primary goal of the study was to classify different levels of familiarity from full-body motion capture and eye movement data. The first part of the study was done online; during this part participants’ familiarity was assessed using a suitable subset of the online study tasks. During the real-world part, participants walked across UC Santa Barbara's campus while we recorded their eye movements, body motion, and location. Over 90 participants generated 4600+ minutes of behavioral data. This dataset is analyzed using both, qualitative and quantitative methods. A qualitative assessment was done in order to find out whether participant’s levels of familiarity can be distinguished based on the elements participants included in a sketch of the route they had taken through the environment. The results pave the way for a research agenda on how to further disentangle the multifaceted relationship of both phenomena. Given the feature richness of the collected behavior, an analysis framework for body and eye movement data was developed based on a less complex dataset collected in 2020. The results show that head movements could indicate familiarity with 96% accuracy using a head-mounted IMU. This framework is now applied to analyze the full-body motion capture dataset.
Despite the known importance of spatial familiarity as a concept, prior to the start of the project, no detailed overview of the conceptualization and measurement of spatial familiarity in wayfinding (i.e. across different feature types and transportation modalities) research existed. Secondly, simultaneously assessing spatial familiarity with landmarks, areas, and routes as geographic features using a set of knowledge and self-report tasks was not done before. Thirdly, it was unknown as to which degree eye and body movements reflect spatial familiarity. The project has advanced the state-of-the-art with respect to all three aspects: The systematic review of literature on spatial familiarity in wayfinding provides a plethora of future research paths with respect to conceptualization, measurement, research design, and environmental setting. The online study provides insights into how familiarity with different geographic features impact each other and how self-report familiarity and performance in knowledge tasks relate to each other for different features. This paves the way for more consistent measurements of spatial familiarity in future studies. Finally, and most importantly, evidence is provided that head movements are a very good indicator to distinguish familiar from unfamiliar people. From an application perspective, this is an important step towards personalization of navigation systems. Personalization of the route instructions presented to users based on their familiarity is one potential means to mitigate the adverse effect the use of navigation systems can have on a person’s spatial orientation abilities.