Navigation versus imagination
The causes of these accidents are a combination of human factors, environmental factors, and information factors that interact with each other. Among the human factors, navigation ability proved to be the most critical. So, what kind of navigation ability do people who get lost have? Interviews with 76 persons who had lost their way proved it very difficult to get detailed information, simply because the majority of people who have been rescued after being lost are still confused about where they have been.
To get more information, Professor Aoyama developed a five category checklist for the interviews with the lost persons. After five days of interviews with one person, he obtained the results shown in figure 1 (see above). The route that the climber had imagined himself taking was completely different from the route he actually walked.
This result was similar to those from previous experiments where subjects imagined being on different trails while walking a real trail. The experiments were conducted between 1997 and 2016, with 612 participants. The question is: What kind of trail do lost people imagine that they are on while walking?