Neuroadaptive LBS: towards human-, context-, and task-adaptive mobile geographic information displays to support spatial learning for pedestrian navigation

Well-designed, neuroadaptive mobile geographic information displays (namGIDs) could improve the lives of millions of mobile citizens of the mostly urban information society who daily need to make time critical and societally relevant decisions while navigating. What are the basic perceptual and neurocognitive processes with which individuals make movement decisions when guided by human- and context-adaptive namGIDs? How can we study this in an ecologically valid way, also outside of the highly controlled laboratory? We report first ideas and results from our unique neuroadaptive research agenda that brings us closer to answering this fundamental empirical question. We present our first implemented methodological solutions of novel ambulatory evaluation methods to study and improve Location-based System (LBS) displays, by critical examination of how perceptual, neurocognitive, psychophysiological, and display design factors might influence decision-making and spatial learning in pedestrian mobility across broad ranges of users and mobility contexts

Limiting the reliance on navigation assistance with navigation instructions containing emotionally salient narratives for confident wayfinding

We live in a world that is increasingly dependent on technology, including for orientation in both familiar and unfamiliar space, which contributes to a long-term erosion of innate spatial navigation skills. In this study, we examined whether modified navigation instructions can make pedestrians less reliant on navigation aids to solve wayfinding tasks. In contrast to standard instructions, the modified instructions make decision-relevant landmarks at intersections emotionally salient and connected through narrative, and thus more memorable. The results of our online VR study with seventy adults revealed that, after navigating an unfamiliar route using modified navigation instructions, people made significantly fewer references to the navigation aid without compromising the accuracy of navigation compared to standard instructions. Narrative-based navigation instructions improved memory for the order in which relevant features in the environment were encountered along the traversed route, but not landmark recognition memory or memory for landmark-direction associations. Our findings highlight the benefits of using human-centred technologies that – as opposed to current navigation systems – promote the encoding and memorability of spatial information during navigation, and have the potential to train human spatial navigation abilities in the long term as a countermeasure toward GPS cognitive deskilling of population

Empirical study of cartograms

We report on an empirical study investigating the effectiveness and efficiency of spatial inference making with contiguous (value-by-area) cartograms, compared to informational equivalent choropleth maps, combined with graduated circles. We find significant differences in people's inference-making performance dependent on the map type. Overall, results suggest that the choropleth map with graduated circles is more effective and more efficient than the cartogram for the analysis of population census data. However, map effectiveness and efficiency also significantly depends on the inference task complexity, and more surprisingly, on the shape characteristics of the depicted enumeration units. For simple tasks, cartograms seem as effective and efficient as the more traditional mapping method. For complex inference questions, inference performance with cartograms is significantly dependent on whether regular or irregular zones are distorted. As we know still very little about the perception and cognition of cartograms, we hope to shed new light for this intriguing mapping method with this empirical study

Landmark Sequence Learning from Real-World Route Navigation and the Impact of Navigation Aid Visualisation Style

Primacy and recency features of serial memory are a hallmark of typical memory functions that have been observed for a wide array of tasks. Recently, the ubiquity of this serial position effect has been supported for objects learned during navigation, with canonical serial position functions observed for sequence memory of landmarks that were encountered along a route during a highly controlled virtual navigation task. In the present study, we extended those findings to a real-world navigation task in which participants actively walked a route through a city whilst using a navigation aid featuring either realistic or abstract landmark visualisation styles. Analyses of serial position functions (i.e., absolute sequence knowledge) and sequence lags (i.e., relative sequence knowledge) yielded similar profiles to those observed in a lab based virtual navigation task from previous work and non-spatial list learning studies. There were strong primacy effects for serial position memory in both conditions; recency effects only in the realistic visualisation condition; a non-uniform distribution of item-lags peaking at lag +1; and an overall bias towards positive lags for both visualisation conditions. The findings demonstrate that benchmark serial position memory effects can be observed in uncontrolled, real-world behaviour. In a navigation context, the results support the notion that general memory mechanisms are involved in spatial learning, and that landmark sequence knowledge is a feature of spatial knowledge which is affected by navigation aids

Tappigraphy: continuous ambulatory assessment and analysis of in-situ map app use behaviour

While map apps on smartphones are abundant, their everyday usage is still an open empirical research question. With tappigraphy – the quantification of smartphone touchscreen interactions – we aimed to capture continuous data stream of behavioural human-map app usage patterns. The current study introduces a first tappigraphy analysis of the distribution of touchscreen interactions on map apps in 211 remotely observed smartphone users, accumulating a total of 42 days of tap data. We detail the requirements, setup, and data collection to understand how much, when, for how long, and how people use mobile map apps in their daily lives. Supporting prior research, we find that on average map apps are only sparsely used, compared to other apps. The longitudinal fluctuations in map use are not random and are partly governed by general daily and weekly human behaviour cycles. Smartphone session duration including map app use can be clearly distinguished from sessions without any map apps used, indicating a distinct temporal behavioural footprint surrounding map use. With the transfer of the tappigraphy approach to a mobile map app use context, we see a promising avenue to provide research communities interested in the underlying behavioural mechanisms of map use a continuous, in-situ momentary assessment method

How does the design of landmarks on a mobile map influence wayfinding experts’ spatial learning during a real-world navigation task?

Humans increasingly rely on GPS-enabled mobile maps to navigate novel environments. However, this reliance can negatively affect spatial learning, which can be detrimental even for expert navigators such as search and rescue personnel. Landmark visualization has been shown to improve spatial learning in general populations by facilitating object identification between the map and the environment. How landmark visualization supports expert users’ spatial learning during map-assisted navigation is still an open research question. We thus conducted a real-world study with wayfinding experts in an unknown residential neighborhood. We aimed to assess how two different landmark visualization styles (abstract 2D vs. realistic 3D buildings) would affect experts’ spatial learning in a map-assisted navigation task during an emergency scenario. Using a between-subjects design, we asked Swiss military personnel to follow a given route using a mobile map, and to identify five task-relevant landmarks along the route. We recorded experts’ gaze behavior while navigating and examined their spatial learning after the navigation task. We found that experts’ spatial learning improved when they focused their visual attention on the environment, but the direction of attention between the map and the environment was not affected by the landmark visualization style. Further, there was no difference in spatial learning between the 2D and 3D groups. Contrary to previous research with general populations, this study suggests that the landmark visualization style does not enhance expert navigators’ navigation or spatial learning abilities, thus highlighting the need for population-specific mobile map design solutions

The effect of landmark visualization in mobile maps on brain activity during navigation: A virtual reality study

The frequent use of GPS-based navigation assistance is found to negatively affect spatial learning. Displaying landmarks effectively while providing wayfinding instructions on such services could facilitate spatial learning because landmarks help navigators to structure and learn an environment by serving as cognitive anchors. However, simply adding landmarks on mobile maps may tax additional cognitive resources and thus adversely affect cognitive load in mobile map users during navigation. To address this potential issue, we set up the present study experimentally to investigate how the number of landmarks (i.e., 3 vs. 5 vs. 7 landmarks), displayed on a mobile map one at a time at intersections during turn-by-turn instructions, affects spatial learning, cognitive load, and visuospatial encoding during map consultation in a virtual urban environment. Spatial learning of the environment was measured using a landmark recognition test, a route direction test, and Judgements of Relative Directions (JRDs). Cognitive load and visuospatial encoding were assessed using electroencephalography (EEG) by analyzing power modulations in distinct frequency bands as well as peak amplitudes of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Behavioral results demonstrate that landmark and route learning improve when the number of landmarks shown on a mobile map increases from three to five, but that there is no further benefit in spatial learning when depicting seven landmarks. EEG analyses show that relative theta power at fronto-central leads and P3 amplitudes at parieto-occipital leads increase in the seven-landmark condition compared to the three- and five-landmark conditions, likely indicating an increase in cognitive load in the seven-landmark condition. Visuospatial encoding indicated by greater theta ERS and alpha ERD at occipital leads with a greater number of landmarks on mobile maps. We conclude that the number of landmarks visualized when following a route can support spatial learning during map-assisted navigation but with a potential boundary—visualizing landmarks on maps benefits users’ spatial learning only when the number of visualized landmarks shown does not exceed users’ cognitive capacity. These results shed more light on neuronal correlates underlying cognitive load and visuospatial encoding during spatial learning in map-assisted navigation. Our findings also contribute to the design of neuro-adaptive landmark visualization for mobile navigation aids that aim to adapt to users’ cognitive load to optimize their spatial learning in real time

Using spontaneous eye blink-related brain activity to investigate cognitive load during mobile map-assisted navigation

The continuous assessment of pedestrians’ cognitive load during a naturalistic mobile map-assisted navigation task is challenging because of limited experimental control over stimulus presentation, human-map-interactions, and other participant responses. To overcome this challenge, the present study takes advantage of navigators’ spontaneous eye blinks during navigation to serve as event markers in continuously recorded electroencephalography (EEG) data to assess cognitive load in a mobile map-assisted navigation task. We examined if and how displaying different numbers of landmarks (3 vs. 5 vs. 7) on mobile maps along a given route would influence navigators’ cognitive load during navigation in virtual urban environments. Cognitive load was assessed by the peak amplitudes of the blink-related fronto-central N2 and parieto-occipital P3. Our results show increased parieto-occipital P3 amplitude indicating higher cognitive load in the 7-landmark condition, compared to showing 3 or 5 landmarks. Our prior research already demonstrated that participants acquire more spatial knowledge in the 5- and 7-landmark conditions compared to the 3-landmark condition. Together with the current study, we find that showing 5 landmarks, compared to 3 or 7 landmarks, improved spatial learning without overtaxing cognitive load during navigation in different urban environments. Our findings also indicate a possible cognitive load spillover effect during map-assisted wayfinding whereby cognitive load during map viewing might have affected cognitive load during goal-directed locomotion in the environment or vice versa. Our research demonstrates that users’ cognitive load and spatial learning should be considered together when designing the display of future navigation aids and that navigators’ eye blinks can serve as useful event makers to parse continuous human brain dynamics reflecting cognitive load in naturalistic settings

Exploring Uncertainty in Canine Cancer Data Sources Through Dasymetric Refinement

In spite of the potentially groundbreaking environmental sentinel applications, studies of canine cancer data sources are often limited due to undercounting of cancer cases. This source of uncertainty might be further amplified through the process of spatial data aggregation, manifested as part of the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP). In this study, we explore potential explanatory factors for canine cancer incidence retrieved from the Swiss Canine Cancer Registry (SCCR) in a regression modeling framework. In doing so, we also evaluate differences in statistical performance and associations resulting from a dasymetric refinement of municipal units to their portion of residential land. Our findings document severe underascertainment of cancer cases in the SCCR, which we linked to specific demographic characteristics and reduced use of veterinary care. These explanatory factors result in improved statistical performance when computed using dasymetrically refined units. This suggests that dasymetric mapping should be further tested in geographic correlation studies of canine cancer incidence and in future comparative studies involving human cancers