STRATEGIES OF VIRTUAL SPATIAL NAVIGATION

The present investigation it is focused in the area of the multimedia communication and virtual spatial and orientation navigation, with implications in the differential psychology that, for the studied multimedia situation we have used, allowed to prove the existence of two groups of users with differentiated behaviours of exploration and distinct strategies of virtual spatial navigation and orientation. The investigation work allowed characterizing a user's model that, through the introduction of a "navigation intelligent help", allowed adjusting ergonomically the multimedia product to the totality of the users. We verify, that the age (or school level) of the subjects seems to be strongly related with the strategy of the used navigation, and there are implicating with the orientation which subjects they do from his position in the virtual space, which seems to increase progressively with the subject's age, the consideration of his orientation in the distance inside the virtual space. The fact that the strategy, progressively decreasing from 10 to 17 years is the mostly used by adults (with ages equal or above to 18 years), opens, in our opinion, new perspectives in the power of the psychology of the development, so it seems more connected with the strategies of problem solving rather than capacities or cognitive competences. The strategy in which the subject is obliged to consider his orientation on the route inside the virtual space, implicates a cognitive supplementary effort based on the memory, which suggests interpretations based on the importance of the memory on the resolution of problems at different ages