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Do Spatial Abilities Have an Impact on Route Learning in Hypertexts?

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Spatial Cognition XI (Spatial Cognition 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11034))

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Abstract

Metaphors of navigation have been widely used to describe the behaviour of users surfing the World Wide Web. We present the results of a web-based experiment (\(N=85\) participants) on route learning in Wikipedia. As spatial abilities and sense of direction are known to be important for real-world wayfinding abilities, we examine the extent to which the participants are able to retrace a learned route on their own and the time taken to do this can be predicted using these variables. The tested (G)LMM models, however, show a lower than expected relevance of spatial abilities and sense of direction. The results suggest that both personal factors (such as age and gender) and task are important for the duration of tasks.

We would like to thank 85 persons willing to participate. We are grateful to David Elsweiler for his valuable comments to a draft version of this paper and to 4 anonymous reviewers for their feedback regarding possible improvements.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chair for Information Science, University of Regensburg, 93053, Regensburg, Germany

    Markus Kattenbeck & Thomas Jänich

  2. Chair for Medical Psychology, Psychological Diagnostics and Research Methodology, University of Regensburg, 93053, Regensburg, Germany

    Ludwig Kreuzpointner

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  1. Markus Kattenbeck
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  2. Thomas Jänich
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  3. Ludwig Kreuzpointner
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Correspondence to Markus Kattenbeck .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

    Sarah Creem-Regehr

  2. University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Johannes Schöning

  3. Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA

    Alexander Klippel

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Kattenbeck, M., Jänich, T., Kreuzpointner, L. (2018). Do Spatial Abilities Have an Impact on Route Learning in Hypertexts?. In: Creem-Regehr, S., Schöning, J., Klippel, A. (eds) Spatial Cognition XI. Spatial Cognition 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11034. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96385-3_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96385-3_15

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