Textual Directions and Cognitive Workload

This project examines and compares the inferred cognitive workload of detailed and non-detailed textual directions in a navigation task. A user study was conducted where participants navigated through two virtual worlds, one urban and one rural, while following detailed and concise sets of textual directions. While navigating, a secondary task measure was used to infer cognitive workload. It was found that although there is no statistical difference between the detailed and non-detailed directions in both environments, there was a difference between the measured cognitive workload and the perceived cognitive workload on the rural map. A trend was also present on one of the maps that showed detailed directions in a simple environment may be redundant. It is important to know how many cognitive resources are allocated when performing a navigation task because it gives insight into how automatically generated directions, in systems such as GPS, should be disseminated to users. It also gives insight into how to communicate spatial information in general.