Stress and Navigation

Navigation is often performed under time pressure, and different people can respond to this time pressure by becoming stressed by or engaged with the task. Stress may reduce a person’s ability to navigate by decreasing his/her attention to landmarks that would otherwise help them find a goal. Engagement may improve a person’s ability to navigate by motivating him/her to search for relevant information. Our projects on stress and navigation can be divided into two stages. First, we are evaluating the opportunities and limitations of mobile physiological devices for measuring arousal. Second, we are investigating the potential causal relationship between stress and navigation using physiological and self-report measures.