Recall of landmarks in information space

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People use landmarks to orient themselves and to organize information. As electronic information space becomes more complex, landmarks may become a useful navigation aid. To examine this possibility, we have assessed people's ability to find and remember the locations of ...

Interactive Technology and Smart Education, 2005

InfoDesign, 2010

The aim of this study is to know readers' movements in electronic space. The complete work is structured as a journey through the World Wide Web (www) environment, constituted by the description of graphic, navigation and organisational elements, readers' methods of manipulation within a web site and mental models readers develop whilst navigating in the web environment. Knowledge of navigation in physical space provides a theoretical framework to study readers' movements in web environments. The stages in acquiring spatial knowledge (landmark-route-survey) are examined and tested. Results suggest that when readers interact with web documents they recall graphic elements as landmarks. Readers develop route knowledge of well-known documents. Readers do not seem to develop survey knowledge or cognitive maps from the tests done. Finally, the author suggests that traversing web documents should be considered as semantic navigation rather than spatial navigation. In this article the author only describes the studies conducted to discover whether readers develop route and survey knowledge in well-known www documents. |30| 2. Development of spatial knowledge in physical space People develop spatial knowledge through a sequence of stages. Siegel and White (1975) developed a model to explain how people interact with the environment and how they develop spatial knowledge from this interaction. The model has three levels: Landmark knowledge Route knowledge Survey or configuration knowledge 2.1. Landmark knowledge Landmark knowledge consists of recognising the reference points or outstanding features that identify a geographic location. Landmarks facilitate learning of the layout of a physical environment. When people are travelling in physical space, the location and position of landmarks specify where to make decisions, at which intersection points, which direction to take, where to turn, etc. If the landmark is relevant for spatial orientation, then it is adequate, authentic (in a pragmatic sense) and allows people to interact with the environment. Sorrows and Hirtle (1999) summarise landmarks' characteristics in three categories which apply to physical and electronic space: Visual Refer to landmarks with salient features, contrasting colours, distinctive positions in the environment, different height or shape that attract the attention of the traveller. They are recalled and remembered, and used for future orientation. Landmarks can also become identifiers of a specific place. i.e. Big Ben is a particular landmark in London. It has a different height, structure and function (clock) than the surrounding buildings and has also become an identifier of London. Cognitive Refer to the conceptual characteristics-cultural or historical content-that landmarks can have, i.e. in Mexico City the Independence Memorial is situated in one of the most important streets, has unique visual characteristics and a strong cultural content. Even though it was created to commemorate Mexico's independence from Spain, it is still used as a cultural landmark to celebrate all types of events, those regarding success or discontent, from victories in sports to protests against government policies. Structural Refer to the location and positional characteristics of landmarks. When landmarks are placed at important intersections or decision points they become an important travelling cue that helps people connect them along a route. i.e. roundabouts are structural landmarks that connect paths and form a complete network of roads. Sorrows and Hirtle (1999) suggest that landmarks that have visual, cognitive and structural values are the strongest cues. Landmark knowledge provides people with the skeletal framework on which they build the cognitive map or internal representation of space (Dillon, McKnight & Richardson, 1993). 2.2. Route knowledge Route knowledge is acquired by sequential connections between departing points, subsequent landmarks and destination points in a journey. After identifying a set of landmarks in the environment, people connect them as routes or paths. Routes are lines of movement or travel that represent distances, orientation cues and ordering of landmarks. (Thorndyke & Goldin, 1983). Route knowledge allows people to navigate or imagine the sequence of landmarks and turns required to arrive at a destination. People gain detailed information of the environment when traversing routes.

1996

We present the results of a study of spatial cognition and its relationship to hypermedia navigation. The results show that a distinction can be made between two kinds of spatial cognition. One that concerns the concomitant acting in the physical world, and on that is a pure internal mental activity. This conclusion is supported by two kinds of data. First, a factor analysis of the subtests used in this study groups them into these two categories, and second, it is shown that only the internal one of these factors is related to the subjects performance in using a hypertext-based on-line help system. In the final section we point to the theoretical connections between this work and work in areas of situated cognition and on different kinds of mental representations, and discuss various possibilities that the results from this study suggest for the development of interface tools that will help users with low spatial abilities to use hypermedia systems.

This article focuses on spatial abilities mobilized during hypertext navigation. Based on the evidence that spatial cognition plays a central role in navigation, we present an experiment involving information search tasks both in physical environment and in hypermedia environment. We investigate how users make use of their spatial abilities to search information in hypermedia, by their performances in hypermedia navigation and physical navigation.As data collection and analysis are still in progress, we present preliminary results based on available data.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2010

Landmarks are fundamental elements for people to learn an environment. People use these landmarks to enrich their route descriptions (for example, when anchoring movements at decision points). Several automatic landmark identification and selection theories have been suggested in recent years. This paper evaluates these theories by comparing the landmarks identified by automatic landmark selection with landmark choices and behavioral characteristics of human participants moving in a virtual environment. This comparison of automatic selection and human behavior will improve our understanding of automatic landmark identification theories, and will facilitate a weighting of methods for navigation services to generate more human-like route descriptions.

2012

In two experiments, participants navigated through a large arena within a virtual environment (VE) to a location encoded in memory from a map. In both experiments, participants recalled locations by navigating through the VE, but in Experiment 2, they additionally recalled the locations on the original map. Two cues were located outside and above the walls of the arena at either north-south locations or east-west locations. The pattern of angular bias was used to infer how the cues affected the creation of spatial categories influencing memory for location in the two tasks. When participants navigated to remembered locations in the VE, two cue-based spatial categories were inferred, with cues serving to demarcate the boundaries of the categories. When participants remembered locations on the original map, two cue-based categories were again formed, but with cues serving as category prototypes. The pattern of results implies that cue-based spatial categorization schemes may be formulated differently at the memory retrieval stage depending on task constraints.

In this article we describe an integrated view of home page structure for recall of information being a powerful concept for the users in information retrieval. We present the results of an experiment investigating the role of structured information in the recall of titles and sub-titles of the site map. We compare the recall of text information of the home page in terms of their hierarchical order at different levels, ascending / descending order, total number of headings recall and total number of levels recall and total possible hierarchical order pages using two types of the Web pages differing in structure of the site map only (structured vs. unstructured) and two types of users (high knowledge vs. low knowledge). All groups were asked to recall the site map of the Web site. The subjects showed improved recall performance for structured information site map page as compared to reduced recall for unstructured one. We argue that structured pages can lead to the construction of better recall process. We believe that the usability of Web tools must allow cognitive resources for navigation planning. The findings from this study indicate that Website developers should construct and provide a conceptual map, which gives a clear insight into the organizational structure of the whole Web site. The findings suggest that the structured site map is importance for both high and low prior knowledge subjects to know that how the ideas of the different document relate to one another.

… theory. Cognitive and computational foundations of …, 1999

47th annual conference of …, 1997

All subjects (N=36) in a balanced 2x2 mixed design experiment read two fictional stories (one with hyperlinks, one without) on a web site. Half of the subjects read stories with a site map. Half read stories without. After reading each story, all subjects completed paper and pencil questionnaires to assess their memory for -and enjoyment of -the story they had just read.