14.04.2026New Publication

Qi Ying, Christopher Hilton, Sara Irina Fabrikant

Abstract
In everyday navigation, people have become increasingly reliant on GPS-enabled mobile maps. Although the development of cognitive maps through repeated exposure to initially unfamiliar environments has been widely investigated, how this process unfolds during mobile map-assisted pedestrian navigation remains an open research question. In this pre-registered within-subjects experiment conducted in a real-world urban environment, all participants (N = 45) were asked to navigate in two conditions: assisted by a mobile map or not assisted. We compared their spatial knowledge acquisition across these two conditions during repeated exposures to the same environment. For this, we asked participants to navigate an initially unfamiliar environment three times over the course of a week, on separate days. We assessed their spatial knowledge with five tasks: route reversal, landmark recognition, route direction, pointing, and distance estimation. Results indicated that increased environmental exposure promoted the concurrent acquisition of landmark, route, and survey knowledge in both navigation conditions. Mobile maps enhanced pointing and route reversal performance, but appeared to impede landmark learning during the initial exposure to the environment. No differences were observed between navigation conditions in route direction or distance estimation performance. The effectiveness of mobile maps in supporting spatial learning was moderated by individual differences in navigation ability and strategy. These findings advance our understanding of how landmark, route, and survey knowledge develop in parallel during repeated mobile map-assisted navigation episodes. Further, we show how mobile maps shape spatial learning processes by way of enhanced survey representations of the environment, but delayed learning of landmarks.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2026.103031