Landmark guidance
research areas
timeframe
2025 - present
contact
armand.kapaj@geo.uzh.ch
This project of the DSI Mobility Community aims to foster collaboration among the community members working on providing empirical-based guidelines to design in-car navigation systems that will enhance driving safety and support the mental spatial representation of space.
The Swiss Council of Accident Prevention (BFU) reports tens of thousands of driving-induced road traffic injuries (RTI) annually nationwide. According to BFU, driver distraction and inattentiveness are the leading causes of RTIs on Swiss roads, with the manual operation of a mobile phone while driving, i.e., tapping on it, looking at its display, as the second biggest contributor. Drivers’ distraction and inattention occur when visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive resources required for safe driving are diverted to other non-driving-related activities.
The in-car navigation systems (satnavs) have become ubiquitous tools in aiding humans’ everyday mobility activities, especially when driving in unfamiliar environments. Satnavs are a significant cause of driver distraction and inattention and have been shown to increase the risk of driving accidents by a factor of 2.5, a well-known phenomenon colloquially referred to as “death by GPS.”
Thus, this project aims to enhance the design of the current in-car navigation systems with landmark information for effective and efficient driving decision-making, which will lead to increased driving safety and spatial learning for reduced reliance on such tools. The project involves community members with extensive experience in spatial cognition research, geography, cartography, and driving safety
Background
Empirical findings suggest that the design of current satnavs is one source of the problem, as satnav providers do not implement evidence-based design guidelines emerging from spatial cognition research. A suggested RTI-reducing solution by the BFU and supported by current empirical spatial cognition research is to improve the design of current satnavs by efficiently and expressively communicating landmark information to drivers to support driving safety and enhance spatial learning. Landmarks are geographic features that stand out from their surroundings. They serve as essential spatial anchor points to guide drivers’ visual attention to task-relevant information, facilitate the map-environment visual matching process, and support decision-making, as well as spatial learning. In doing so, LMs help reduce overtaxing cognitive resources during driving and further mitigate satnav dependency for improved driving safety.
Goals
The project’s main goal is to direct drivers’ visual attention to the environment, reduce satnav dependency while driving, support their mental representation of space, mitigate the overtaxing cognitive resources required for navigation while driving, and improve driving safety.
To achieve this goal, the main objective is to enhance the design of the current satnavs with auditory and visual salient landmarks and investigate drivers’ navigation performance compared to the existing satnavs.
Methods
To accomplish this objective, we plan to carry out a user study with drivers invited to the UZH state-of-the-art, naturalistic, and ecologically valid VICTOR driving simulator to empirically assess our landmark-enhanced satnav design with current in-car navigation system design (control) on drivers’ navigation performance, driving safety, visual attention behavior, neurocognitive responses, and spatial learning of the traversed environment. Additionally, we plan to assess the role of individual driver differences (e.g., spatial abilities) and group differences (e.g., age, gender) and their potential interaction with satnav design on driving and spatial learning performance.
The behavioral and physiological data obtained from the comparative assessment of the satnav proof-of-concept with the existing satnavs will provide empirical-based results whose dissemination will inform accident prevention measures and awareness campaigns.