The influence of intentional and incidental learning on acquiring spatial knowledge during navigation

In order to study the influence of intentional and incidental learning conditions on route learning, young adults walked a route through a university building. Half of the participants focused their attention on the route (intentional learning condition), while the other half did not (incidental learning condition). Five tests of spatial knowledge were employed: a route-length-estimation, landmark recognition, landmark ordering, map-drawing and navigation task. The intentional group performed better than the incidental group on the map-drawing and navigation task. No difference between the intentional and incidental group was found on the landmark-recognition and landmark-ordering task. Moreover, the intentional group overestimated the walking distance, while the incidental group underestimated it. These results suggest that route knowledge (landmark recognition and landmark ordering) requires less effortful processing than survey knowledge (developing a map-like representation and actual navigation).