How do voice-assisted digital maps influence human wayfinding in pedestrian navigation?

ABSTRACT

Voice-assisted digital maps have become mainstream navigation aids for pedestrian navigation. Although these maps are widely studied and applied, it is still unclear how they affect human behavior and spatial knowledge acquisition. In this study, we recruited thirty-three college students to carry out an outdoor wayfinding experiment. We compared the effects of voice-assisted digital maps with those of digital maps without voice instructions and paper maps by using eye tracking, sketch maps, questionnaires and interviews. The results show that, compared to the other map types, voice-assisted digital maps can help users reach their destinations more quickly and pay more attention to moving objects, thereby increasing the comfort levels of participants. However, the efficiency of voice-assisted maps on route memory tasks does not rival that of paper maps. Overall, the use of voice-assisted digital maps saves time but may reduce pedestrians’ spatial knowledge acquisition. The results of this study reveal the influence of voice on pedestrian wayfinding and deepen the scientific understanding of the multimedia navigation mode in shaping human spatial ability.

KEYWORDS:

• Eye tracking
• wayfinding experiment
• pedestrian navigation
• voice-assisted digital map
• spatial knowledge acquisition

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dr. Liao Hua for help with data analysis and all the participants in the experiment for their contributions to the study.

Disclosure statement

There are no relevant financial or nonfinancial competing interests to report.

Data availability statement

Because of the protection of the research participants’ privacy and subsequent ethical problems, the original eye tracking data, including video records, cannot be publicly shared. Despite this constraint, we were able to prepare a tidy data table encoded from the original data, with three participants. The data supporting the findings of this study are openly available on figshare website at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.16968460.v1

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant No. 41871366], National Key Research and Development Program of China [Grant No. 2017YFB0503602] and State Key Laboratory of Geo-Information Engineering and Key Laboratory of Surveying and Mapping Science and Geospatial Information Technology of MNR, CASM [Grant No. 2021-04-03].