The Position of Sound in Audiovisual Maps: An Experimental Study of Performance in Spatial Memory

Abstract

Digital maps are known as reliable media for communicating spatial information. People use maps to make themselves familiar with new environments and to form cognitive representations of spatial configurations and additional semantic information that are coupled with locational information. Since the mid-1990s, cartographers have explored auditory media as cartographic elements to transfer spatial information. Among the established sound variants used in multimedia cartography, speech recordings are a popular auditory tool to enrich the visual dominance of maps. The impact of auditory elements on human spatial memory has hardly been investigated so far in cartography and spatial cognition. A recent study showed that spoken object names bound to visual location markers affect performance in memory of object locations. Map users tend to make significantly smaller spatial distortion errors in the recall of object locations if these locations are coupled with auditory semantic information (place names). The present study extends this approach by examining possible effects on sound position as cues for spatial memory performance. A monaural condition, where an auditory name is presented in a spatial location corresponding to the object location, is compared with a binaural condition (of no directional cue). The results show that a monaural communication additionally improves spatial memory performance. Interestingly, the semantic information bound to an object location appears to be the driving factor in improving this effect.