The effect of different types of navigation assistance on indoor scene memorability

With the rapid growing of wearable computing devices, indoor navigation guidance will become popular in the near future like the GPS-based navigation tools for drivers today. However, how the guided indoor navigation affects human’s memory of a novel environment has not been well studied. In this paper, we investigate route memory with three types of navigation assistance, that is, 2D map, wearable navigation assistant, and human usher. Twenty participants were asked to remember the route while being guided through a novel indoor environment. Our results show that the participants have similar patterns in remembering visual scenes, even using different types of assistance. These findings support previous work on scene memorability and provide the new insight that scene memorability is not affected by the type of navigation guidance. This may indicate that spatial working memory and visual memory are dissociated. We also show that scenes with navigation information are more memorable than scenes without such information. Finally, we provide some evidence that the location of a scene is linked to its memorability. In general, our findings provide valuable information about indoor scene memorability.