Navigating in multi-level buildings: The effect of rotation on people’s perception of spaces. A framework for emergency situations

In spatial cognition there is a wide body of literature that investigates navigation in built environments, either indoor or outdoor; users’ behavior has been analyzed with the support of various disciplines according to their different approaches. Most of these studies focused on translational movements in two-dimensional environments, neglecting the effects and the difficulties encountered when wayfinding tasks are performed in multilevel buildings. Moreover, at the present state of the art, far less attention has been paid to the effect that rotational movements have on navigational performance, despite, or perhaps because, the fact that rotation is a major factor in disorientation. In particular, in emergency situations there are several aspects to take into account: the complexity of the layout, familiarity, the geometry of environments, the individual perception of risk, the time at which the alarm is given. For this reason, it becomes crucial to understand the relationships between the geometry, the technology of built environments and human behavior in emergency situations. These behaviors depend on the individual's perception of the risk which, in turn, influences the actions that will be taken to make themselves safe. The difficulty in navigating environments where there are curves, angles of different size stems from the fact that human beings naturally adopt different spatial frames of reference. The effort in this work aims at developing a conceptual framework to analyze the effects of rotation in order to permit a successful navigation. This paper analyzes the results of two experiments: the first one, carried out at the University of Bremen (D), using a qualitative approach, and the second one, carried out at the Technical University of Bari (I), using a quantitative analysis. Participants took part into a series of pointing tasks in order to evaluate their disorientation after performing rotations. Results show the influence of the built environment geometry on the acquisition of spatial information and on the resulting cognitive map.