The need for controlled information processing in the visual acquisition of route knowledge

The route knowledge of participants who performed a concurrent task during a simulated route-learning exercise was compared to that of participants en gaged only in the route-learning exercise by employing tests of scene recog nition, distance estimation and map verification. Results indicated perform ance decrements on the scene recognition and distance estimation tasks on t he part of participants in the concurrent task condition, thus supporting t he interpretation that these tasks were sensitive to the reduction in avail able attentional resources. Performance on the map verification task was ge nerally poor, a fact that may have masked the general effect of the concurr ent task manipulation. Comparisons involving only those subgroups for which performance was above chance level provided evidence that this task was al so sensitive to the availability of resources. In addition, results from th e map verification task clearly pointed to map orientation as an important factor influencing the ability to recognize a cartographic representation o f a path of movement within a large-scale environment. (C) 1998 Academic Pr ess.