Angela Colter, Kathryn Summers, Cheri Smith from the University of Baltimore’s School of Information Arts and Technologies have authored a great paper titled Exploring User Mental Models of Breadcrumbs in Web Navigation.
Breadcrumbs are a common Web site navigation element, yet little is known about whether users notice, use and understand what they are. We surveyed 4,775 sites to determine how many use breadcrumbs and what conventions exist, then conducted usability tests to explore user mental models of breadcrumbs.
In my opinion even people who are not very technically inclined still most likely understanding intuitively what the purpose of Breadcrumbs are when they see them on a webpage. It comes down to structure of a website. If people have navigated from a homepage to a sub-page on a site they probably understand that simply reversing back through the breadcrumbs thread takes them “backwards”. At any rate this is a great exploration of the functionality.
