Individualization in Spatial Behaviour and Map Reading

Abstract. For a long time, research has investigated spatial behaviour of people in navigation research and identified different wayfinding strategies. Researchers agree, that the environment with its structure and features influences the wayfinding strategies. The present paper presents a tool to investigate people’s strategies during navigation tasks. GeoGami, an educational geogame fostering navigational map reading skills, can be used to collect trajectories of people navigating through an environment. We developed a semantically annotated representation of the environment and clustered the resulting trajectories according to their spatio-temporal and semantic similarity. The result shows the existence of groups of common spatial patterns along with individual spatial behaviours that cannot be grouped into a cluster.