Collaborative Wayfinding: A Critical Review

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 find their way 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. We then draw lessons from five mature fields in the study of collaborative cognition: social ontology, distributed cognition, transactive memory, group problem-solving, and 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. We suggest ways to test for emergence in collaborative wayfinding, and to assess varying divisions of cognitive labor in groups with matching or competing spatial capacities or strategies.