The benefits of global landmarks for spatial learning under stress

Abstract

In a fast-paced digital society, individuals increasingly rely on computerized location-based services to efficiently find their way through unfamiliar environments. However, scientific evidence is increasingly showing that despite digital navigation assistance helping people to find their way, it can cause wayfinders to become “mindless” of the traversed environment, thus acquiring no or very little spatial knowledge in the long term. It is still not entirely clear what causes these impairments or how the design of navigation devices can be improved to counteract such undesirable effects. The objective of this thesis is to gain empirical insights into the role of stressful navigation conditions for potential spatial learning impairments, and to identify the features in the environment for which it is particularly important that wayfinders’ pay attention to and thus increase their spatial knowledge even when experiencing stress. Building on existing work in spatial cognition, cognitive geography, and stress research, the studies of this thesis investigate whether and how highly visible landmarks can improve memory of large spaces like cities, and how that may be influenced by navigators’ stress states. It is widely accepted that landmarks serve a key role for the development of spatial knowledge, and there has been increasing interest in integrating landmarks into automated navigation instructions in recent decades. Specifically, recent studies have pointed to a potential advantage of so-called global landmarks that are visible from several locations in an environment for spatial orientation and route learning. However, there has been little research on the difference in mentally encoding and learning the locations of global landmarks as compared to landmarks that are only visible locally. In this thesis, I conducted two virtual reality experiments that assessed human participants’ capability to acquire spatial knowledge from local or global landmark configurations in situations with and without stress. Insights from this work can help designers of future navigation systems, and industry decision makers, to reconsider which and when landmarks should be presented in navigation systems. For example, future navigation assistance may dynamically adapt the display of local and global landmarks according to the contextual demands of the wayfinder. In Study I, I investigated the role of time pressure in learning the spatial relations among local landmarks (e.g., a shop along the route) as compared to global landmarks (e.g., a tower in the distance) during navigation through virtual cities. During this navigation, participants used a navigation aid and had explicit learning instructions for the different local or global landmark configurations. Participants’ performance in a survey knowledge test after navigation suggests that global landmark configurations were not represented more accurately than local landmark configurations, and that survey knowledge acquisition was not impaired under time pressure. In contrast to prior findings, the results of Study I indicate no advantage of distant global landmarks for spatial knowledge acquisition. In Study II, I investigated the role of working memory in acquiring survey knowledge from sequentially (locally) or simultaneously (globally) visible landmark configurations during navigation through virtual cities. As in Study I, participants navigated routes through virtual cities, but both local and global landmarks were located along these routes. Moreover, one group of participants performed a concurrent spatial task that aimed to interfere with the active processing of information in working memory. I expected that an increase in spatial working memory demands would impair survey knowledge for sequentially visible local landmarks more than for simultaneously visible global landmarks. I also assessed individuals’ working memory capacity, because I expected greater capacity to be beneficial for the sequential integration of local landmarks over time. My findings show a negative effect of concurrent task demands for both local and global landmark learning. Furthermore, the data indicates that participants had improved spatial knowledge of globally visible landmarks as compared to locally visible landmarks along the route. Finally, Study II revealed that individual working memory capacity moderates the accuracy of acquiring spatial knowledge of global landmarks. Only participants with greater working memory capacity are able to benefit from globally visible landmarks. In summary, this work has identified a number of cognitive and contextual conditions that impair users’ ability to take advantage of globally visible landmarks for spatial learning. Based on these conditions, the present work provides design guidelines for future learning-aware navigation systems. For example, my analysis of participants’ learning performance indicates that users with greater working memory capacities have the necessary cognitive resources available to take advantage of global landmarks for spatial learning. While this might imply that the navigation systems of tomorrow need to be aware of users’ spatial abilities to optimize information display, future research should also identify means to support navigators with low working memory capacity.