Language and spatial cognition: comparing the roles of landmarks and street names in route instructions

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the processes involved when people use spatial descriptions intended to assist navigation. More specifically, we compared the effectiveness of route directions in an urban environment based on references either to landmarks or to street names. In the first experiment, the participants learned route directions that referred either to landmarks or to streets named after landmarks (e.g. a hospital vs. ‘Hospital Street’). Processing times were shorter for instructions based on landmarks than for those based on street names. When the participants subsequently drew the route described, their memory was better when they had processed landmark rather than street information. The same route directions were used in the second experiment, in which the participants' memories were tested in a recognition task. The results showed that when target words referred to landmarks, the participants were more accurate and took less time to respond than when the same words were used to refer to streets. This finding indicates that the results of the previous experiment cannot be attributed to differing costs of the retrieval processes. Overall, the results of these experiments confirm the special cognitive status of landmarks in the mental representation of routes.