Neuroadaptive mobile geographic information displays: an emerging cartographic research frontier

Mobility, including navigation and wayfinding, is a basic human requirement for survival. For thousands of years maps have played a significant role for human mobility and survival. Increasing reliance on digital GNSS-enabled navigation assistance, however, is impacting human attentional resources and is limiting our innate cognitive spatial abilities. To mitigate human de-skilling, a neuroadaptive (mobile) cartographic research frontier is proposed and first steps towards creating well-designed mobile geographic information displays (mGIDs) that not only respond to navigators’ cognitive load and visuo-spatial attentional resources during navigation in real-time but are also able to scaffold spatial learning while still maintaining navigation efficiency. This in turn, will help humans to remain as independent from geoinformation technology, as desired.