Understanding Mobile Spatial Interaction in Urban Environments.

In order to act in urban environments an individual accesses various types of knowledge, such as memories, spatial strategies and also information from the environment so as to develop plans and make decisions. This chapter will investigate the nature of spatial knowledge acquisition in an environmental setting by comparing performance in a task where the participants 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 participants' spatial knowledge acquisition for orientation and distance estimation tasks in a large-scale urban environmental setting. The initial findings of the experiment highlight the fact that mobile map participants performed worse in distance estimation tasks than map participants and that their errors for complex routes were high. We will conclude by analysing 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.