Markus Kattenbeck (Spatial HCI lab), won this Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship to study the behavioral correlates of pedestrian wayfinders as a function or their environmental familiarity.

The FamConMe project contributed significantly to the understanding and implementation of familiarity in geographic information systems, adding to our knowledge on how to conceptualize familiarity and providing ways to assess it in-situ based on behavioural data. We were particularly interested in understanding the conceptualization and measurement of spatial familiarity in human wayfinders so far; finding a way to assess a person’s sense of spatial familiarity at different levels and relate it to the person’s knowledge; predict the degree of a person’s spatial familiarity from eye and full-body movements during wayfinding. Beyond the theoretical advancement, the outcomes of this project are an important first step towards personalization of navigation systems. Continuously monitoring how familiar a person is, provides one basis for a system to tailor route instructions specific to a user’s need. This improves the user experience of such systems and, even more importantly, helps to mitigate potentially adverse impacts navigation system use might have on our spatial orientation abilities.