Towards Personally Relevant Navigation: Interaction Effects of Cognitive Style and Map Orientation on Spatial Knowledge Development
Abstract
Under the emergency situations such as floods and fires, or indoor navigation when the local landmarks and GPS is no longer available, the acquisition of comprehensive environmental representation became particularly important. While the previous indoor navigation studies have mainly focused on the navigation efficiency, training individuals to acquire spatial knowledge is often ignored. Spatial navigation is a multidimensional construct that commonly involves many spatial factors such as spatial learning perspective, spatial ability, spatial strategy and spatial knowledge. Several studies also demonstrated that individual differences may play an important role in spatial navigation. There are some studies have suggested that individual personality, especially cognitive style (Field Independent vs. Field dependent) may relate to individual spatial learning. The study hypothesized that a certain type of learning perspective may be more efficient than the others for individuals with different cognitive styles. Forty participants were recruited and performed spatial task in the virtual maze environment. Field Independent participants exhibit greater scores in spatial visualization and spatial orientation test. There was, however, no considerable difference in spatial relation ability between Field Independent (FI) and Field dependent (FD) participants. The notable finding is that the correlation between spatial visualization and cognitive style is more robust than the correlation between spatial visualization and gender. The study results also revealed that there was no significant interaction between cognitive style and everyday navigation strategy. Both FD and FI participants showed more accurate canonical organization in their sketch map after they were guided by a north-up map. In terms of route knowledge, FI participants had more correct answers in the landmark sequencing tests after they were guided by a north-up map compared to their performance in forward-up map conditions. On the other hand, FD participants had higher accuracy in landmark sequencing tests in the forward-up map condition than their performance in the north-up map condition. In the route retracing test, however, there was no statistically significant effect of map orientation on different cognitive style groups. This study has suggested that cognitive style may have a potential effect on the relationship between map orientation and acquiring spatial knowledge.
Citation
Park, Hannah (2022). Towards Personally Relevant Navigation: Interaction Effects of Cognitive Style and Map Orientation on Spatial Knowledge Development. Doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /197231.