while I like the topic and think this is an interesting lens, this study seems to start from the position that navigation can be understood to be a geometry problem alone, but uses sample data from the real world, which is not an abstract environment lacking in local qualities. This seems like a pretty large mismatch between the study's lens and the data set in question. I'm reading both this posting and the study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-021-00130-y.pdf

> pedestrians appear to choose paths that seem to point most directly toward their destination, even if those routes end up being longer. They call this the “pointiest path.”

The sample in the article for how people walk versus the shortest path has a lot of other attributes beyond "it looks like it points there". The example trip is in Boston, the destination is probably the Boston Marriott on Huntington Ave. Who is taking this path? Have they spent time in the area, or is it their first time here? At what time of day are they walking? Are all path segments similarly well-lit? Do they have any sense of urgency? Are all path segments equally interesting?

There is a reward for walking down an interesting street: it's interesting. You're stimulated. Is there a reward for making it to your destination in two minutes and ten seconds instead of two minutes and twenty seconds?

In the example trip, pedestrians along the sub-optimal path are mostly taking Dartmouth Street, which is a main street for that neighborhood. Most people who have spent any amount of time there will know that Dartmouth hits Huntington, so you can just take Dartmouth; a local would give directions as such, and a local would probably walk as such. Their optimal route along Canton and Harcourt Street requires pedestrians to twice know that there is a path that can continue when it does not appear on a street map; twice the path is disjoint. This doesn't appear to be acknowledged in the study. You would have to know the side streets very well to know that path was even an option, and explaining it to a tourist would be very cumbersome and involve a lot of steps. For example, assuming the pedestrian is exiting a building facing south, the path chosen by pedestrians can be explained thusly: "make a right when you get outside, then take your first right along Dartmouth, and keep going until you see a big intersection and make a left on Stuart". The optimal route: "make a right when you get outside, when the street ends take a right onto Cantor, and then stay on Cantor until it ends, cross over the pedestrian zone and you'll be on Harcourt. When you get to the corner of Harcourt and St Botolph, go over the sidewalk to continue along Harcourt because Harcourt is disjoint. Keep going along Harcourt until you reach the six-way intersection, and make a slight right onto Huntington." I know how ridiculous this is because I lived over there for five years. To compare these two routes as geometric shapes and ignore their actual features is of unclear value. The route preferred by Google Maps to go from 79 Warren Ave to Boston Marriott Copley Place is the shortest route; the route that people do _not_ take.

> pedestrians chose routes that were slightly longer but minimized their angular deviation from the destination

this is one way of looking at it, but another way of looking at it is that people take main roads because they know how the main roads connect but aren't sure which sidestreets connect and which ones have dead ends. The study also doesn't seem to mention time of day for the data and density of street lights; a more direct route going through an unlit street is likely not going to be the preference of a person walking at night.

Anyway, there is a very good book called "The Image of the City" by Kevin Lynch, which is about how people form mental models of the built environment. People use these mental models to navigate. One of the model cities in that book is also Boston, and the book also came from MIT. It is curious that none of the concepts mentioned in Lynch's book appear in this study; it seems to suggest that the authors believe that people only imagine the geometry of a space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Image_of_the_City