Naive Realism in Terrain Appreciation: Advanced Display Aids for Routing

Terrain appreciation must often be obtained from visual displays. However, users appear unaware that different terrain tasks are best supported by different terrain views. They express a blanket preference for high-fidelity realistic 3-D perspective views - a so-called Naïve Realism (Smallman & St. John, 2005). In last year's study, users preferred higher spatial fidelity than necessary for route-laying, when it was lower fidelity that unmasked avenues through terrain needed to lay well-concealed routes (Smallman, Cook, Manes & Cowen, 2007). Intriguingly, those of lower spatial ability persisted in a preference for high fidelity even after experience with the task. Here, we extend and refine last year's paradigm to test whether spatial ability makes one differentially sensitive to explicit task feedback by adding a display aid feedback manipulation between-participant. Feedback was available from an on-demand route “exposure envelope” visualization and a continuously-available overall route exposure score. Results revealed naïvely realistic intuitions - preferring high fidelity shaded perspective views when they never supported the best performance - on all tasks, unmitigated by spatial ability. However, after experience with the task, spatial ability contributed to savvier intuitions about the relative utility of the feedback aids, and better performance with the novel aids. Overall, feedback dramatically improved routing and made topo maps almost as good as low-fidelity shaded perspective views for routing, compensating for topo's usually observed inferiority for such shape understanding tasks. The study both refines the Naïve Realism theory and has applied implications for the design of terrain displays.