Using a picture (or a thousand words) for supporting spatial knowledge of a complex virtual environment

Abstract

External representations powerfully support and augment complex human behavior. When navigating, people often consult external representations to help them find the way to go, but do maps or verbal instructions improve spatial knowledge or support effective wayfinding? Here, we examine spatial knowledge with and without external representations in two studies where participants learn a complex virtual environment. In the first study, we asked participants to generate their own maps or verbal instructions, partway through learning. We found no evidence of improved spatial knowledge in a pointing task requiring participants to infer the direction between two targets, either on the same route or on different routes, and no differences between groups in accurately recreating a map of the target landmarks. However, as a methodological note, pointing was correlated with the accuracy of the maps that participants drew. In the second study, participants had access to an accurate map or set of verbal instructions that they could study while learning the layout of target landmarks. Again, we found no evidence of differentially improved spatial knowledge in the pointing task, although we did find that the map group could recreate a map of the target landmarks more accurately. However, overall improvement was high. There was evidence that the nature of improvement across all conditions was specific to initial navigation ability levels. Our findings add to a mixed literature on the role of external representations for navigation and suggest that more substantial intervention-more scaffolding, explicit training, enhanced visualization, perhaps with personalized sequencing-may be necessary to improve navigation ability.

Keywords: External representations; Sketch maps; Spatial cognition; Virtual navigation.

Fig. 1

Examples from the Virtual Silcton desktop virtual environment used in Studies 1 and 2. Note. The top panel a shows screenshots from the Virtual Silcton desktop virtual environment; the bottom panel b shows an overhead map of the main routes and connecting routes participants navigated

Fig. 2

Navigator profiles at T1 and T2 for Study 2. Note. The top panel a shows navigator profiles at T1, and the bottom panel b shows navigator profiles at T2

Fig. 3

Within- and between-route pointing improvement as a function of navigator type in Study 2