Psychology Architecture can make it easier to find your way around a shopping center
Lost in a shopping center? A new study shows which strategies make people more successful at finding their way around complex buildings and which architectural features help them to keep an overview.
29.01.2026, 08:01
SDA
According to the study, open floor plans and the ability to create a mental map of the surroundings help people to find their way, as the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), which funded the study, announced on Thursday.
For the study, almost seventy test subjects used virtual reality goggles to navigate through a virtual shopping center modeled on a real-life mall in Singapore. Their task was to find ten specific stores one after the other and then visit four of them again.
The researchers recorded the walking routes and tracked the participants' line of vision using eye tracking. Finally, the participants had to create a 3D sketch of the building from memory.
Two strategies for orientation
The evaluation of the data confirmed two known main strategies that people use for orientation. The first is based on prominent landmarks. This can be a conspicuous plant or a sculpture that serves as an anchor point in the memory to locate other places.
The second strategy is to memorize paths and junctions and thus create a mental map of the surroundings. The quality of this inner map proved to be decisive for success: the more accurate the 3D sketches drawn by the test subjects were, the more efficiently they had previously moved around the virtual building.
Ability possibly trainable
According to researcher Christian Vater from the University of Bern, the skills for both strategies are individual, but can be trained. According to the researcher, however, little research has been done into this.
The study also provided insights into which architectural elements facilitate orientation: Wide corridors helped the participants as they were able to see the stores they were looking for earlier. Open areas such as atriums, which provide an overview over several floors, proved to be particularly helpful.
Vater conducted the study at ETH Zurich together with Christoph Hölscher. It was published in the "Journal of Environmental Psychology".
