Investigation of age-differentiated spatial semantic elaboration strategies for communicating route instructions

This paper investigates the effect of spatial semantic elaboration strategies on young and older participants’ performance and preferences in a route drawing task where participants read route instructions and then drew the route on a map. In particular, an elaborated form of spatial perspective that communicated the route instruction in both egocentric and allocentric perspectives was compared against just the egocentric or allocentric perspective instructions individually. Additionally, route instruction granularity was varied to compare elaborated hierarchical instructions that communicated goal and landmark information with flat instructions. The results of the experiment showed that older participants performed best with least confusion in the allocentric perspective with flat granularity, but that they benefited from semantic elaboration when less optimal spatial strategies were used, unlike young participants who performed best with the mixed (i.e. elaborated) perspective and flat granularity. The experiment showed that older participants actually suffered from what might be information overload when excess semantic elaboration was provided, as was likely the case with the use of the mixed perspective, which confused them considerably. In addition, hierarchical granularity was only beneficial in confusing spatial perspectives, while it detracted from older participants’ performance in their optimal perspective, showing that there is a fine balance to be struck between beneficial semantic elaboration and information overload.