Recently, many new tools have been developed to assist wayfinding to the destination, yet few still feel the difficulty reaching to the destination. Such people are generally classified as person with "no sense of direction". Many researches have been done on the sense of direction and composition of spatial cognition, but most of them have only revealed the elements related to it. Even when measuring the ability of people, it often ends up grouping into 2; "no sense of direction" or not. However, the problem may not lie being so-called "no sense of direction" but on the miss-match of information. In order to establish the hypothesis, the brain mechanism of spatial cognition was investigated, and it was found that there are brain cells that acquire information of "direction", "route" and "landscape"; for example Head-direction cell, Grid cell, Place cell and Spatial view cell. While moving to the destination, three types of information (orientation, navigation and location) are extracted from the environment, using the information to direct the current location and the destination. Based on the brain mechanism of spatial cognition, hypothesis was created that there are 3 main abilities, "Sense of Direction", "Map Recall" and "Scenery Recall", and that high and low of each ability creates 8 types of spatial cognition. There are many researches on spatial cognition, and those results show that the factors related to spatial cognition can be summarized into six: "Azimuth Cognition", "Sense of Direction", "Map recall", "Scenery Recall", "Anxious" and "Word Instruction".
Therefore, in this research, experiments were done in order to extract factors for street perception and establish spatial cognition types. First, impression evaluation was done to grasp the framework of street perception. As a result of the factor analysis, six factors (“Map Recall and Anxious”, “Azimuth Cognition”, “Sense of Direction”, “Word Instruction”, “Scenery Recall” and “Map Rotation”) were extracted. Since three factors out of six factors corresponded to the three abilities of the hypothesis, the validity of 3 ability was suggested.
Next, the sample size was examined by power analysis before a route walking experiment. As a result, 15 subjects are needed in one group, so in total 30 subjects were selected for the next experiment. A route walking experiment was conducted to test the abilities by 3 practical tasks; 1. task of indicating the direction, 2. task of selecting the correct route plan, and 3. task of selecting the correct picture. The difference of 6 factor loadings of street perception evaluation was t-tested by the 2 groups divided by the quartile of each subject’s task score. Analytical result suggested that there was significant differences of factor loading score corresponded to each ability between the 2 groups; “Sense of Direction” with Angular error mean (25 percentile-value), “Map Recall” with time of selecting route chart (75 percentile-value) and “Scenery Recall” with correct rate of selecting pictures (25 and 50 percentile-value).
In conclusion, 3 main abilities can be classified into two groups, which proved the hypothesis that stated 8 types of spatial cognition. Further study is needed to find out suitable information type for each spatial cognition types.
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