Pedestrian navigation through public spaces reflects the nature of interaction between behavior and environment. This study compared pedestrian choice behavior at shopping mall intersections in China and the United States. The study found that in both countries (a) pedestrians chose movement patterns that involved the fewest steps and (b) there…

In April 2013, Florida will commemorate Juan Ponce de Leon's historic voyage. Yet Ponce de Leon's arrival was, in several important ways, not just the beginning of Spain's presence in Florida, but in North America as a whole. Today, the historical Spanish influence on America is palpable--in culture, language, politics, and more. This year marks…

Collaborative design empowers learning management system (LMS) providers and end users (online students) to develop a vibrant teaching and learning community. Successful periodic collaborations utilizing collaborative web tools between these two pivotal groups can produce the next series of eLearning platforms that are fertile grounds for…

Three experiments investigated whether navigation is less efficient across boundaries than within boundaries. In an immersive virtual environment, participants learned objects' locations in a large room or a small room. Participants then pointed to the objects' original locations after physically walking a circuitous path without vision.…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop a mobile service, based on anonymous location-based data, to help students find available reading rooms on a university campus. To evaluate this mobile service, both a usability test and a technology acceptance test were carried out. Design/methodology/approach: The research followed a design…

In the past decade, a number of personalized learning systems have been developed and they mainly focus on learners' prior knowledge. On the other hand, previous research suggested that gender differences and cognitive styles have great effects on student learning. To this end, this study examines how human factors, especially gender differences…

In this study, researchers sought to capture students' authentic experience of finding books in the main library using a GoPro camera and the think-aloud protocol. The GoPro provided a first-person perspective and was an effective ethnographic tool for observing a student's individual experience, while also demonstrating what tools they use to…

This study investigated interactive effects of navigation and offline comprehension skill on digital reading performance. As indicators of navigation, relevant page selection and irrelevant page selection were considered. In 533 Spanish high school students aged 11-17 positive effects of offline comprehension skill and relevant page selection on…

Perceptions of usability and navigability contribute substantially to initial impressions of university and program websites. A survey was administered to graduate students in special education at four intervals between 2006 and 2014 to determine their perceptions of university and special education doctoral program websites. For this article,…

An influential theory of spatial navigation states that the boundary shape of an environment is preferentially encoded over and above other spatial cues, such that it is impervious to interference from alternative sources of information. We explored this claim with 3 intradimensional--extradimensional shift experiments, designed to examine the…

"I found it!" Addison proudly proclaimed, as she used an iPhone and Global Positioning System (GPS) software to find the hidden geocache along the riverbank. Others in Lisa Bostick's fourth grade class were jealous, but there would be other geocaches to find. With the excitement of movies like "Pirates of the Caribbean" and…

Passenger collaboration offers a potential compensatory strategy to assist older drivers who have difficulty driving in unfamiliar areas (wayfinding). This article describes a survey of 194 healthy, community-dwelling older drivers and their regular passengers to investigate how passengers assist drivers, and to identify the characteristics of…

Barber, Donnelly & Rizvi (2013): "An avalanche is coming: Higher education and the revolution ahead" addresses some significant issues in higher education and poses some challenging questions to open and distance learning (ODL) administrators, policy makers, and of course to ODL faculty in general. Barber et al.'s paper does not…

The occurrence of spontaneous recovery in human spatial memory was assessed using a virtual environment. In Experiment 1, spatial memory was established by training participants to locate a hidden platform in a virtual water maze using a set of four distal landmarks. In Experiment 2, after learning about the location of a hidden platform, the…

The ability to navigate new environments has a significant impact on the daily life and independence of people with learning difficulties. The aims of this study were to investigate the development of route learning in Down syndrome (N = 50), Williams syndrome (N = 19), and typically developing children between 5 and 11 years old (N = 108); to…