Navigation assistance systems are increasingly used as support for spatial orientation when navigating through the environment. The main benefit is reduced task load of the user as they provide turn-by-turn navigation instructions. This enhances safe navigation in a dynamic and safety critical surrounding. However, automated navigation assistance systems diminish the processing of the surrounding environment which accelerates the decline of spatial orienting abilities.
The talk presents several studies investigating incidental spatial knowledge acquisition when using auditory navigation instructions incorporating references to salient objects in the environment. The knowledge about those landmarks and their locations helps to build a mental representation of the environment.
The results of five experiments consistently showed improved landmark and route knowledge when using landmark-based navigation instructions as compared to standard GPS guidance. This effect was robust when testing the paradigm in simulated driving and during pedestrian navigation through the real world. Further the effect was independent of individual spatial abilities and was still present several weeks later. Even though incidental learning was triggered, landmark-based navigation instructions did not significantly increase subjective mental load during assisted navigation.
Mobile EEG recordings allowed for the analysis of brain activity during assisted navigation in the real world. A frontal component of the blink-related potentials indicated increased engagement with the environment when using landmark-based navigation instructions.
Integrating landmark references in auditory navigation instructions is a simple, but powerful way to initiate processing of the environment and, hence, provide a learning-oriented navigation assistant which can preserve the users’ spatial abilities.