Possibilities for Designing Enhancing Spatial Knowledge Acquirements Navigator: A User Study on the Role of Different Contributors in Impairing Human Spatial Memory during Navigation

Satellite mobile navigation systems have been criticized for impairing human spatial memory as an assistant in daily life. Nevertheless, few studies have directly investigated the specific role of different main contributors in such impairment in the same context. This study selected two of the main contributors leading to the impairment of human spatial memory and then made every possible effort to eliminate them from the navigation system: return user's route decision-making control, and subliminally return user's attention that has ever been distracted by the system to the environment. Two navigation modes were designed and compared in detail with the different spatial knowledge acquired by the efficient everyday navigation system. A within-subjects study in Virtual Reality (VR) urban environment was conducted and data on spatial knowledge was collected and analyzed. We concluded that the redirection of attention significantly benefits the acquisition of landmark as well as route knowledge, and the increase of route decisions further benefits survey knowledge as well as self-orientation. We also reflected on how these results might implicate future navigation systems design, and the results of analysis showed that it was possible to design a navigation system that does not impair or even enhance user's spatial memory while still retaining efficient navigation. Based on our findings, different future application-specific studies can better design navigation systems that focus on different spatial memories.