Collaborative wayfinding: a critical review and research agenda

Though people can navigate alone, collaborative wayfinding is ubiquitous in human life. Use of GPS devices does not inevitably make it easy to navigate together: conflict in collaborative wayfinding is familiar to most of us, as is failure at it. Yet we know little about how people use navigation devices together: what mechanisms and conditions support effective group dynamics and performance? What difference does a shared history make in grounding communication and decision-making in wayfinding? Only in the last few years have these questions started to be addressed, but recent developments have come from separate disciplines in a disparate way, both methodologically and theoretically. We critically review recent experimental work and develop a new research agenda inspired by empirical studies of collaborative recall. Sometimes, navigating together effectively depends on jointly remembering spatial information encoded together during earlier joint action. We suggest tractable designs to identify shared spatial knowledge and assess collaborative process gains and losses, alongside better methods to tap the microprocesses of embodied interaction in small groups remembering routes together. Identifying a clear research agenda that incorporates studies with navigation experts and a range of technologies, we suggest ways to test for emergence in collaborative wayfinding, and to assess varying divisions of cognitive labour in groups with matching or competing spatial capacities or strategies.