The effect of navigational expertise on wayfinding in new environments
Open accessAbstract
Becoming proficient at navigation in urban environments is something that we all aspire to. Here we asked whether being an expert at wayfinding in one environment has any effect on learning new spatial layouts. Licensed London taxi drivers are among the most proficient urban navigators, training for many years to find their way around a complex and irregularly-laid out city. We first tested how well they could learn the layout of an unfamiliar town compared with a group of non-taxi drivers. Second, we investigated how effectively taxi drivers could integrate a new district into their existing spatial representation of London. We found that taxi drivers were significantly better than control participants at executing routes through the new town, and representing it at a map-like survey level. However, the benefits of navigational expertise were not universal. Compared with their performance in the new town, taxi drivers were significantly poorer at learning the layout of a new area that had to be integrated with their existing knowledge of London. We consider reasons for this picture of facilitation and limitation, in particular drawing parallels with how knowledge acquisition occurs in the context of expertise in general.
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Experienced London taxi drivers had considerable difficulty learning a novel version of London that differed from their previously learned version, unlike non-expert controls.
“Performance on spatial memory tests, such as drawing the layout of the novel environment in a sketch map and recognizing scenes from photographs, indicated that, unlike non-expert controls, the taxi drivers had considerable difficulty learning a novel version of London that differed from their previously learned version of London 68 .”
From From cognitive maps to spatial schemas (2023) · cites this paper as [68]
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From cognitive maps to spatial schemas
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- Authors
- Woollett, K., & Maguire, E. A.
- Affiliations
- Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Woollett, Katherine
- Maguire, Eleanor A.
- ORCID
- Maguire, Eleanor A.
- Venue
- Journal of Environmental Psychology
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2010-12
- Volume
- 30
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 565-573
- ISSN
- 0272-4944 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC2989443
- OpenAlex
- W2116246639
- Cited by
- 68
- References
- 44
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 7 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 6 · 2014: 8 · 2013: 3 · 2012: 2
- FWCI
- 6.97
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Journal of Environmental Psychology (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Wellcome Trust
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Automotive Engineering › Spatial Cognition and Navigation
- Social Sciences › Geography, Planning and Development › Geography Education and Pedagogy
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Building and Construction › Urban Design and Spatial Analysis
- Keywords
- wayfinding, urban navigation, taxi drivers, spatial learning, spatial representation, route learning, knowledge integration, expertise acquisition, London
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