The role of detours in individual human navigation patterns of complex networks

Despite its importance for public transportation, communication within organizations or the general understanding of organized knowledge, our understanding of how human individuals navigate complex networked systems is still limited owing to the lack of datasets recording a sufficient amount of navigation paths of individual humans. Here, we analyse 10587 paths recorded from 259 human subjects when navigating between nodes of a complex word-morph network. We find a clear presence of systematic detours organized around individual hierarchical scaffolds guiding navigation. Our dataset is the first enabling the visualization and analysis of scaffold hierarchies whose presence and role in supporting human navigation is assumed in existing navigational models. By using an information-theoretic argumentation, we argue that taking short detours following the hierarchical scaffolds is a clear sign of human subjects simplifying the interpretation of the complex networked system by an order of magnitude. We also discuss the role of these scaffolds in the phases of learning to navigate a network from scratch.