CityLab: Smartphones and the Uncertain Future of 'Spatial Thinking'
... Traditionally, people get around their houses, neighborhoods and cities with the help of an internal "cognitive map." But that system isn't much of a map at all. It's more like a personal library filled with discrete bits of knowledge, landmarks (a bus stop, a church, a friend's house), and routes. When faced with a new wayfinding task, the brain assembles a plan from those elements. It's hard work, and its exact mechanism remains a subject of dispute among neuroscientists.
Digital navigation is in some ways a radical break from the type of planning our parents did. "When people plan a route based on their mental representation, they have to form a sequence of these landmarks, and follow this plan by reaching landmark after landmark," Stephan Winter, a professor of geomatics at the University of Melbourne, tells me. "When people use navigation systems, they don't do this planning any longer."
Experts who study the issue are concerned that spatial thinking might be the next casualty of technological progress, another cognitive ability surpassed and then supplanted by the cerebral annex of the Internet. "Basically, people don't really learn their environments," says Haosheng Huang, who works at the Research Group in Cartography at the Vienna University of Technology. They worry we may become, as a society, what the Japanese call hōkō onchi—deaf to direction. ...
... In a handful of studies conducted over the last decade in the United States, England, Germany and Japan, researchers have shown that GPS navigation has a generally pernicious effect on the user's ability to remember an environment and reconstruct a route. ...
... Isn't it ironic: the easier it is for me to get where I'm going, the less I remember how I got there. ...
... "I think the parallel with the 19th century actually says the addition of the digital dynamic is going to expand context, make people more geographically literate," says David Rumsey, whose extensive map collection testifies to the cartographic trends of past generations. "I don't think it leads to a loss of spatial consciousness—I think it's exactly the opposite." ...
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