A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Human Wayfinding Behavior Using Maps and Written Directions

The aim of this study is to prove the existence of cultural diversity in human spatial cognition between Japanese and Americans by conducting a cross-cultural wayfinding experiment. Twenty Japanese and 19 US university students were instructed to walk through a route on campus twice using either a map or a written direction and were asked to evaluate the effectiveness of the materials used on a 7 grade scale after each trial. They were also asked to compare the usability of the two materials after completing the trials. Their errors and time-performance were also measured. The results derived from an application of a quantitative analysis revealed the existence of cultural differences in the relative evaluation task, although the actual performances did not show a significant difference. Furthermore, their absolute evaluation scores of the first trials obtained from the language-first group indicated that Americans gave written directions considerably higher ratings than Japanese, whereas the second trials of the map-first group disclosed that Japanese rate the same material considerably lower than Americans. The results demonstrated that participants felt discomfort with the less familiar medium even when the wayfinding task was easy enough to follow. Such uneasiness may stem from the cultural schema of spatial descriptions to which they have been familiar. When the description style of provided material was not archetypal from the viewpoint of their shared cultural schema of geographic description, people tended to feel larger discomfort because of the mismatch.