Our society is currently undergoing a digital transformation in various domains and urban environments are among them. The development of a smart city, or super smart society called “Society 5.0” in Japan, aims for the achievement of an open and innovative society with people, things, and information being connected online, offering a possible solution to societal problems associated with a population decline and population ageing. The construction of 3D urban models (or digital twins) is also an example in a similar vein. The key element in such an attempt is the merging of real space and cyberspace with the deployment of advanced geospatial technology and locational information, so that people can access information necessary anywhere at any time.

   

A major application of geospatial technology in people’s daily life is navigation assistance. Knowing where you are is an important aspect of everyday human spatial behavior, but spatial orientation poses difficulty for some people, particularly people with a poor sense of direction. Navigation tools using various sensory information such as sound and vibration are certainly effective for assisting people in navigation, especially people with visual impairments. At the same time, being accustomed to the use of navigation tools, or more specifically, passively following turn-by-turn directions provided by the tool, may have a negative impact on the user’s spatial awareness. In fact, empirical evidence suggests that overreliance on satellite navigation deteriorates
people’s spatial orientation ability (or human sense of place).

    

This issue has been discussed in the literature in the context of spatial thinking, which is identified to play an important role in academic learning and everyday activities. A type of spatial thinking that is of particular significance to people’s daily activities is cognitive mapping, a series of psychological processes of acquiring, representing, and using knowledge about spatial environments. Importantly, the skill of cognitive mapping shows large individual differences. With the existence of such large individual differences, researchers’ attention has shifted from asking whether people’s cognitive maps are maplike to investigating how and why people differ so

much in the fundamental ability of cognitive mapping.

 

In this lecture, I will look at a smart city from a cognitive-behavioral perspective and consider how one can make such a spatially enabled society truly pleasant for people to live in. To do that, I focus on the topic of human spatial awareness and the research of cognitive mapping from an individual differences perspective. In particular, I discuss long-term cognitive consequences of the use of satellite navigation tools on people’s spatial awareness and possible ways to adjust social design to the wide variations in spatial aptitudes and preferences among people.