Does (multi-)touch aid users' spatial memory and navigation in 'panning' and in 'zooming & panning' UIs?

Abstract

Recent findings from Embodied Cognition reveal strong effects of arm and hand movement on spatial memory. This suggests that input devices may have a far greater influence on users' cognition and users' ability to master a system than we typically believeespecially for spatial panning or zooming & panning user interfaces. We conducted two experiments to observe whether multi-touch instead of mouse input improves users' spatial memory and navigation performance for such UIs. We observed increased performances for panning UIs but not for zooming & panning UIs. We present our results, provide initial explanations and discuss opportunities and pitfalls for interaction designers.

Memory in Motion

“…Conditions that used touch performed better than mouse [11,28]. However, when replacing the mouse with an indirect touch modality, findings show no difference in spatial memory and an improvement for navigation performance for the indirect interaction on a small input surface [20].…”

“…They asked 28 participants to perform a memorization task on a 18.1 screen with an invisible grid and concluded with a 19% increased memorization accuracy for touch input. Building on this work, Jetter et al [11] investigated the effect of multi-touch vs. mouse input on participants' navigation performance and object location memory in panning and panning & zooming interfaces. Results show that multi-touch results in better spatial memory and navigation performance for panning interfaces but not for panning & zooming interfaces.…”

“…We used a well-established and validated task [11,13,15,16,17,22] consisting of a navigation phase and a subsequent object location memory phase (see the video in supplemental materials). Using one of the input modalities, a canvas could be navigated using panning operations.…”

“…Previous research has shown that the display size and the input modality impact on users' spatial memory and navigation performance [11,20,23,24,27,28]. Yet, these studies investigated in-and output modalities separately, making it difficult to apply the results to real world scenarios.…”

“…Also, previous work suggests that different aspects of embodiment (e.g. touch vs. mouse [11,28], body vs. touch panning [13], body movement [22], direct vs. indirect touch [20]) positively affect spatial memory performance. However, existing studies mostly compare input modalities that differ profoundly in their interaction techniques, not explaining how the underlying aspects of embodiment influence spatial memory.…”