Navigating from one place to another in the urban environment is an important action for people in everyday life. We know that there are two kinds of people. One kind can navigate themselves smoothly to their destination even on their first visit (good navigators), and the other kind cannot navigate themselves easily because they lose their way (bad navigators) although they have visited this site several times.
It is important for us to navigate smoothly to our destination. But the reasons why bad navigators often lose their way and what causes people to navigate badly is not yet clear.
The purpose of this study is to reveal the reasons why bad navigators lose their way. We think that by clarifying the reasons we will be able to design navigable buildings or navigable urban environments.
The important topic in navigation research has been the person's cognitive map which is a mental representation of environment. It has been said that there are two types of cognitive maps[][], one type is a route map which is best for estimating the distance of a path and the other is a survey map, which is best in estimating Euclidean distance and judging positions because it is like a bird's eye view map[]. It has been suggested that a good cognitive map would make an excellent navigation aid.
However Passini[] has found that persons do not actually need detailed cognitive maps to navigate. They just need to recognize a relevant position or a necessary feature of the environment instead of recalling the whole route. From this point of view, the reason why bad navigators often lose their way, seems to be not only a failure in acquiring a good cognitive map.
In everyday life bad navigators lose their way in a variety of situations. Shingaki interviewed people about bad navigators' performances[]. From these interviews Shingaki classified two kind of bad navigator situations. In one situation, bad navigators lose their way during their first visit, where they have the necessary information about their route, such as maps, signs and verbal explanation about the route. In another situation, bad navigators lose their way during their second visit although they have memory of the first visit. The main difference between these situations lies in the kind of information that bad navigators utilize in the navigation. In the case of a second visit they use their memory of the first one, while in the latter case they use mainly other information such as maps and signs.
The purpose of this study is to reveal the problem of bad navigation. The navigator's problem is complex because it seems to be related to whether they can get a good cognitive map, whether they can use their cognitive map during navigation. In this paper our first step in understanding the bad navigator's problem is to investigate the situation in which bad navigators lose their way during their second visit. We divided subjects into three groups according to their navigation performance of a second visit. Then we investigated the difference between the good navigators group and the bad navigators group (excluding the middle performance group).