Understanding mobile spatial interaction in urban environments

In order to act in urban environments an individual access various types of knowledge, such as memories, spatial strategies and also information from the environment in order to develop plans and make decisions. This paper will investigate the nature of spatial knowledge acquisition by comparing performance in a task where the subjects learnt the environment using spatial assistance; either from a map or from a mobile map. It outlines the early results of an empirical experiment which evaluated subjects spatial knowledge acquisition in a large scale environmental setting for orientation and distance estimation tasks. The initial findings of the experiment highlight the fact that mobile map subjects performed worse in distance estimation tasks than map subjects, and that their errors for complex routes were high. We will conclude by analyzing the results of this experiment in terms of the specific types of knowledge afforded by mobile maps and the implications for spatial learning in urban environments.