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.
