Thirty years ago, Williamson and Barrow published an interesting piece of work: They asked participants to keep a diary of incidents of route finding errors. Contrary to common sense expectations, these errors turned out to be more frequent in familiar environments as opposed to unfamiliar environments. So a lack of attention seems to play a crucial role here – which is also in line with research stressing the issue of mind wandering…
Here’s the DOI for those of you who are interested in reading the paper: https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.2350080508