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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.
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This content will become publicly available on March 8, 2026
Comparative Evaluation of Differing Levels of Information Presentation in 3D Mini-Maps on Spatial Knowledge Acquisition in VR
Maps have long been a favored tool for navigation in both physical and virtual environments. As a navigation aid in virtual reality, map content and appearance can differ significantly. In this paper, three mini-maps are addressed: the WiM-3DMap, which provides a standard World-in-Miniature of the city model; the novel UC-3DMap, featuring important landmarks alongside ordinary buildings within the user’s vicinity; and the LM-3DMap, presenting only important landmarks. These mini-maps offer varying levels of building detail, potentially affecting spatial knowledge acquisition performance in diverse ways. A comparative study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of WiM-3DMap, UC-3DMap, LM-3DMap, and a baseline condition without a mini-map in spatial tasks such as spatial updating, landmark recall, landmark placement, and route recall. The findings demonstrated that LM-3DMap and UC-3DMap outperform WiM-3DMap in the tasks of spatial updating, landmark placement and route recall. However, the absence of detailed local context around the user may impede the effectiveness of LM-3DMap, as evidenced by UC-3DMap’s superior performance in the landmark placement task. These findings underscore the differences in effectiveness among various mini-maps that present distinct levels of building detail. A key conclusion is that including ordinary building information in the user’s immediate surroundings can significantly enhance the performance of a mini-map relying solely on landmarks.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2007435
- PAR ID:
- 10621236
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 979-8-3315-3645-9
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 526 to 536
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- User-centered design: World-in-Miniature: 3D mini-maps Navigation aids Spatial knowledge acquisition (SKA)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Saint Malo, France
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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