Despite its importance for public transportation, communication within organizations
or the general understanding of organized knowledge, our understanding of how human
individuals navigate complex networked systems is still limited owing to the lack
of datasets recording a sufficient amount of navigation paths of individual humans.
Here, we analyse 10587 paths recorded from 259 human subjects when navigating between
nodes of a complex word-morph network. We find a clear presence of systematic detours
organized around individual hierarchical scaffolds guiding navigation. Our dataset
is the first enabling the visualization and analysis of scaffold hierarchies whose
presence and role in supporting human navigation is assumed in existing navigational
models. By using an information-theoretic argumentation, we argue that taking short
detours following the hierarchical scaffolds is a clear sign of human subjects simplifying
the interpretation of the complex networked system by an order of magnitude. We also
discuss the role of these scaffolds in the phases of learning to navigate a network
from scratch.
