The Role of Place Attachment and Spatial Anxiety in Navigational Knowledge

The role of emotions in human navigation is barely known. Indeed, navigational models suggest that the familiarity with the environment and the cognitive style predict the navigational performance, but, except for spatial anxiety, they have scarcely investigated the contribution of the emotional dimension. The study explores the relation between navigational knowledge and the emotional dimension in terms of place identity (PI), a factor of attachment to place (i.e., the emotional bond that individuals develop towards places), and spatial anxiety (SA). Ninety-nine students (71 female) at the University of Catanzaro (UMG) were given online self-report questionnaires on the familiarity with the UMG Campus, SA (Lawton, 1994), PI (Williams & Vaske, 2003), and sense-of-direction (Hegarty et al., 2002). Then, following Siegel and White model (1975), they were also given three navigational tasks probing landmark, route, and survey knowledge of the UMG Campus. Participants were divided into high/low level of PI (HPI vs. LPI) and high/low level of SA (HSA vs. LSA) groups by a median split of their scores on the PI and SA questionnaires. The HPI reported a significantly better performance in landmark and route tasks than the LPI, while the LSA showed a significantly better performance than the HSA in the survey task. Multiple regression analyses, where the independent variables were the scores on all the self-report questionnaires, confirmed the role of the PI for the landmark task. Familiarity with the environment was the only variable contributing to the performance in all the navigational tasks, while sense-of- direction contributed to the performance on route and survey tasks. These results emphasize the role of familiarity and sense-of-direction in navigational knowledge and suggest a contribution of the emotional bond towards a place in landmark knowledge. Future studies by using an active manipulation of emotions may report more precisely their contribution to human navigation.