NAVIGATION STRATEGIES FOR ORIENTATION OF YOUNG ADULTS IN THE ENVIRONMENT OF MEGALOPOLIS
Setting themselves the task of creating a comfortable and convenient urban space, modern psychologists study such phenomena as “spatial consciousness”, “spatial mapping”, “spatial abilities”, “navigation strategies”, “environmental knowledge”, “pathfinding”, etc. key concepts of the cognitive direction of the psychology of the subject-spatial environment. Most of these concepts are widespread in foreign studies, but insufficiently represented in domestic literature. The central construct - “navigation strategy” is one of the most “popular” in terms of the degree of content differentiation, and the most significant group of studies for psychologists is a group of studies devoted to studying the influence of individual psychological factors of subjects on the formation of navigation strategies and building routes. Taking into account the key importance of the cultural and historical conditions of the environment, multiple studies by foreign scientists cannot provide a complete picture applicable to current Russian realities. Therefore, the purpose of this article was to empirically identify the features of the navigation strategies of young people in the environment of a large metropolis using the example of the Ekaterinburg. The study was carried out as part of a laboratory experiment using the Tobii Pro Spectrum eye tracker with a demonstration of an electronic map of the Ekaterinburg. The respondents were asked, taking into account the movement on foot, to pave the way from the starting point of the route to the final point by moving their eyes across the map. The experiment involved 30 people aged 19 to 26 years, of which 40% are men, 60% are women with different experience of interacting with the real environment of Ekaterinburg. The results obtained were processed using the methods of mathematical and statistical data analysis: descriptive statistics, comparative analysis. The results of the study made it possible to conclude that the factors of gender and experience of living in a metropolitan environment are not decisive for the choice of the trajectory of movement between the starting and ending points of the route. The construction of walking routes in an urban environment occurs subject to their simplification and linking traffic to the main and major streets and transport schemes, and the optimization of the route for walking is not typical for the majority of respondents. In addition, characteristic tendencies in the navigation strategies of young people were identified: the discreteness of iconic objects of the urban environment and their priority in relation to routes, gravitation when building routes to the boundaries of districts, traffic patterns, main streets of the megalopolis, orientation towards a parallel-perpendicular street structure even in the case of the presence of diagonal paths of movement.