Evaluating Geospatial and Semantic Recall of an Urban Environment Using GPS and Road Maps

The use of a global positioning system (GPS) device for navigation tasks has been well studied and found to be more effective in guiding a user to their destination than traditional road maps. In this paper, we examine how the recall of our environment is affected by using each of these methods. We evaluate the two devices by measuring semantic and geospatial recall of 18 participants after a navigation task through an urban environment, and find that road map users demonstrated a significantly better geospatial understanding. Semantically, road map users identify semantic elements significantly more often using common terms compared to GPS users. Lastly, road map users were significantly better at correctly placing semantic elements in geospatial locations and tend to concentrate the placements in tighter clusters than GPS users.