Landmarks as beacons and associative cues: their role in route learning

Relatively little is known about how people use the landmarks in their environment to learn routes. Landmarks are commonly regarded as associative cues--stimuli that enable recall of directional responses that lead closer to the navigator's goal. We contrast the function of landmark as associative cue with that of a beacon-a landmark near enough to a goal that moving toward it leads the navigator closer to his or her goal. In five experiments, participants learned a route through a simple desktop virtual environment. In the first three experiments, routes were learned better when their landmarks served as beacons than as associative cues. Two additional experiments showed that the acquired route knowledge depends on the function that landmarks serve during learning. Beacon-based route knowledge is less enduring and relatively less likely to involve knowledge of directions in the environment than is the route knowledge formed from landmarks that serve as associative cues.