When a cognitive agent is reading a map, the usually preferred orientation is 'up is ahead. Such maps are called aligned, and there have been many cognitive studies on the errors caused by misaligned maps. All such studies, however, use maps that are devoid of landmarks. In this paper, we study the effect of landmarks on the alignment error. In our experiment, the participants were asked to memorize their starting position and a destination on a map, and then navigate themselves from the starting position to the destination in a three-dimensional virtual-reality simulation of the map. During the memorization phase the maps were displayed in different orientations with respect to the starting position of the participant and the destination. Our experimental results show that when landmarks are present, the destination orientation has a much more pronounced effect than self-orientation. In other words, introducing landmarks seems to reduce the effect of self-orientation to almost negligible.
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