Stress Supports Spatial Knowledge Acquisition during Wayfinding with Mobile Maps

Abstract

GIScience 2016 Short Paper Proceedings Stress Supports Spatial Knowledge Acquisition during Wayfinding with Mobile Maps P. Frei 1 , K.-F. Richter 1 , S. I. Fabrikant 1 Geography Department, University of Zurich Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057 Zurich, Switzerland {patrice.frei|kai-florian.richter|sara.fabrikant}@geo.uzh.ch Abstract We detail a novel empirical approach with in-situ psycho-physiological measurements to assess how stress influences spatial knowledge acquisition, mobile map use, and wayfinding success when performing a navigation task in an unknown urban environment. We recorded pedestrians’ navigation trajectories, mobile map interactions, eye movements, and galvanic skin responses, with varying stress conditions. Our results clearly indicate that stress supports navigators in forming good survey knowledge, possibly due to enhanced engagement. This seems to emerge from their goal-oriented interaction with the mobile map. Our study results contradict earlier findings, contribute to the on-going debate whether using mobile navigation systems are harmful for humans’ capacity to acquire environmental knowledge during navigation, and highlight the important influence of people’s individual spatial abilities and emotional states on their knowledge acquisition. 1. Introduction Does spatial knowledge acquisition deteriorate when people rely on mobile navigation assistance, as prior studies suggest (e.g., Gardony et al. 2013)? If yes, does it relate to disengagement from the navigated environment (Leshed et al. 2008), and/or from the wayfinding decision-making process (Bakdash et al. 2008)? These questions motivated our study. As increasing empirical evidence suggests that navigation performance can be predicted by varying individual differences, for example, spatial abilities (Hegarty et al. 2002), personality traits, such as anxiety (Thoresen et al. 2016), or emotional states, such as stress (Wilkening and Fabrikant 2011), we wondered how individual differences might interact with spatial knowledge acquisition and mobile map use. 2. Methods Thirtyfive members (f:2; m:33) of the Swiss Armed Forces International Command (SWISSINT) participated in our study. Before the experiment participants completed a demographic questionnaire, the Santa Barbara Sense of Direction Test (in German), the perspective-taking/spatial orientation test, and the building memory test. We divided participants into two (‘stress’ | ‘control’) groups by median-split on their perspective-taking test results, such that each group contained the same number of ‘high’ and ‘low’ performing participants. Participants were asked to navigate from a start to an end location along five waypoints in a given sequence, in an environment unfamiliar to them. They were given a mobile map application running on a tablet computer, which displayed start and end locations, the waypoints, and participants’ current (GPS) position, but no prescribed routes. Participants wore a mobile eye tracker connected to a laptop carried in a backpack, and a wrist-band 1 that recorded various psycho-physiological signals (e.g., galvanic skin responses http://bodymonitor.de/smartband/