Abstract
The present work investigated the impact of affect in landmark-based wayfinding. We assumed that affect-laden landmarks improve wayfinding performance and have an impact on later landmark recognition. To investigate our hypotheses, we ran two experiments in a virtual maze. In Experiment 1, we investigated how affect-laden landmarks influence wayfinding and recognition in comparison with neutral landmarks. The aim of Experiment 2 was to focus on the affective valence of a landmark. The memory tasks of both experiments were repeated after 1 week in order to assess memory consolidation. Results showed that the best wayfinding and recognition performance occurs when negatively laden landmarks were used. In comparison with neutral and positively laden landmarks, recognition performance hardly decreased over time for the negatively laden landmarks. Our results not only support findings in the field of emotion research but also expand the concept of semantic landmark salience with respect to emotional responses.
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Handling editor: Don Ross (University of Cape Town); Reviewers: Sabine Timpf (University of Augsburg), Rul von Stuelpnagel (Universtity of Freiburg).
Ceylan Z. Balaban and Harun Karimpur have contributed equally to this work and should be regarded as first author; the order of authorship was determined by a coin flip.
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Balaban, C.Z., Karimpur, H., Röser, F. et al. Turn left where you felt unhappy: how affect influences landmark-based wayfinding. Cogn Process 18, 135–144 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-017-0790-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-017-0790-0