Getting lost

Getting lost is the occurrence of a person or animal losing spatial reference. This situation consists of two elements: the feeling of disorientation and a spatial component. Getting lost is a popular expression to explain that someone is in a desperate situation.

Psychology and neuroscience help to understand the underlying processes which take place before, during and after getting lost. Getting lost is an aspect of behavioral geography, in which human wayfinding and cognitive and environmental factors play a role. For successful travel, it is necessary to be able to identify origin and destination, to determine turn angles, to identify segment lengths and directions of movement, to recognize on route and distant landmarks. This information is required to plot a course designed to reach a destination (previously known or unknown) or to return to a home base after wandering. If a destination is known but is not directly connected by a path, road, or track to the origin, successful travel may involve search and exploration, spatial updating of one's location, finding familiar landmarks, recognition of segment length and sequencing, identification of a frame of reference. Human movement is often guided by external aids (cartographic maps, charts, compasses, pedometers, and the like).

Getting lost is particularly problematic for children (who have not yet developed tools and strategies for maintaining their bearings) and for the elderly, particularly those experiencing the onset of dementia. Such individuals "can get lost while trying to find their local shop – due to their diminishing memory they can forget where the shop is, or where they live and why they went out of their house in the first place". People experiencing dementia also get lost more easily in poor visibility conditions because the mind fails to appropriately fill in cues as to missing landmarks. Getting lost in unfamiliar terrain can lead even an adult with a healthy mind to panic and engage in unthinking behaviors that make the situation even worse. The tendency of the mind to seek patterns and familiar signs can contribute to this in two ways. First the lost person may mistake features of the terrain for markers that were seen before they became lost, creating a false sense of orientation that may lead the lost person to pursue routes that take them even further off course. Second, the lost person may mistake such features for markers that were seen after they became lost, creating a false sense that they have made a circle and returned to an earlier point of their effort to find their bearings.

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Wikipedia