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Comment by cgriswald | Hacker News Reader

> If we’re being honest, it’s not that hard to imagine doing something similar ourselves. Most of us use GPS as a crutch while driving through unfamiliar terrain, tuning out and letting that soothing voice do the dirty work of navigating.

It is very difficult for me to imagine driving 250 miles out of the way (especially when I'm tired and really want to get where I'm going); or driving into the ocean; or driving off a bridge because I've ignored all the road closed signs. I don't even shut my brain off to this degree when another human is helping navigate.

The article is saying our cognitive maps are deteriorating because navigation software provides the information instantly at hand. For some people that may be true. I've noticed this effect in other aspects of my life, though not with navigation. But even if true, that does not explain people ignoring all other indicators that something is not correct.

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This sounds like a remix of one of the many "internet is making us dumb" stories. If anything the existence of GPS, satellite, constantly updated maps, and now detailed 3D city maps makes our "cognitive maps" (whatever that means) far better now than in the past where our navigation was done from printed Rand McNally folding map.

The reality is there are a lot of impaired drivers on the road. May be they have been drinking, have early onset dementia, or just a mixture of prescription medications with undocumented side effects. A lot have spent half the time sending text messages on their phones. Whatever the circumstance, some of the tools we have now let them survive longer or at least pretend they know what they are doing.

You only listed impairments with no excuse that are socially unacceptable but done all the time by everyone and statistically usually ends well almost every time anyway. There's another class of impairment that make no interesting clickbait and no social signalling... Kid sick in the back seat or just naughty, unexpected construction reroute, dark, bad weather, digestive impairment or other sudden onset illness setting in, the purpose of the trip might be highly distracting (funeral, sick relative in hospital), crazy unanticipated traffic jams, maybe the car is mechanically starting to act up.

Those stories make terrible clickbait unless there's a GPS involved, then the GPS can take 100% of the blame as if there was nothing else involved, and it makes itself insta-clickbait.

And possibly the biggest one of all, just being tired. Most people don't get enough rest these days, and that can be just as bad as being drunk, in terms of what it does to your focus and coordination.

Do you really doubt that if you use a GPS to navigate over an unfamiliar route and were then asked to repeat the journey the following day, you'd do significantly worse than if you'd had to plan your original route by hand?

A cognitive map is an internal mental map of how some region of space is connected. Using landmarks and signs to follow a route from a map naturally builds mental connections between your observations of the world and the corresponding points on the map, in a way that following spoken directions does not.

I recently moved across the country, to a city I'd never been in before.

I tend to use the GPS on my phone the first couple of times I need to go to some particular place. After that, the experience of having driven the route a couple times is good enough that I can find my way.

I do. Seeing the moving map while I drive helps cement everything together for me. I can see if you just blindly obey the machine and pay no attention to the context that it would hurt, but nothing says you have to do it that way.

But then, I'm one of those people who generally only needs to see a route once in order to know it. When I visit people in other cities, after a few days I'm often showing them how to get to places rather than vice versa.

I absolutely think that following the GPS provides a worse mental map of the area/route than looking at an old fashioned paper map.

Here in Melbourne we have (shortly: had) the Melways. A4 size traditional map-book, two pages covers a good couple of suburbs. Let's call it a 5km-wide area.

When you look at this map, you see the relationships of suburbs. Balaclava is just to the east of St Kilda, which flows to the south to Elwood, etc. You see the major arterial roads and where they lead. You build a proper, high-level mental model of where you are.

Contrast this to the GPS. "Turn left in 100m" tells you nothing of your locale. It gives you no context. You see a sign that says "Elwood" and you're heading south because the beach is to your right and you know you want to be in St Kilda but this isn't useful to you: your brain doesn't instinctively think, hmm, that just feels wrong.

GPS is amazing until it doesn't work, and then you are truly lost.

I know that my own navigational skills have atrophied - I used to be able to glance at a map in an unknown area and that'd be all I'd need to get to X. I can't do that anymore these days. I wouldn't do the 250-mile excursion (I'm nowhere near that bad), but the bit that puzzles me is the stories of the people who drive into obstacles - GPS is a navigator, it doesn't change the nature of driving itself. You wouldn't drive through a red light because that's where your GPS was directing you, so why would you drive into an obstacle?

TL;DR: "Obeying orders" is a powerful pattern; combined with "computer is always right", it can be downright deadly.

An anecdote: I've been driving in this one particular city for ages, I know the streets and their properties - yet while I was busy with traffic (rain and night and pedestrians, oh my), it only took a "turn left NOW" command to send me wrong way into a one-way street (instead of the correct one, a block down). I knew that specific street was one way, but not focusing on navigation at that moment, I have blindly obeyed, as it looked somewhat reasonable; only after turning did I realize what I have done (fortunately, nothing else came of that incident). Note that I do not have blind trust in algorithms - quite the contrary (turned out the navigation's data was wrong), yet I have outsourced a part of my cognitive load onto the device.

I'm not blaming the device: the faulty action was all mine (that's what you get for a talking toaster ordering you around). What I got was some insight: I no longer wonder why someone with more trust in their computing devices could do something so "blindingly stupid." This is probably the one area in UX that's hard to fix: the assumption that Friend Computer Is Always Right.

The way I've often viewed it is that (to exaggerate a bit), you have to mental bandwidth to either figure out your own route or to carefully listen to and follow instructions (whether from a GPS or a person). It can be hard to listen to instructions and evaluate in each case whether you should follow them or not.

If I know a trip should take about two hours, and after three hours I'm not there, I know something went wrong. That's a good time to stop and reassess the situation.

Shouldn't you check the route preview before driving to see how long the GPS thinks the trip will take?

That is essentially what I meant, more or less. To your point a little bit of critical thinking goes a long way as well. If I've programmed a route from Chicago to Milwaukee (let's call it 100 miles) and the GPS tells me it will take 9 hours, that should be a clue something isn't right. Either I've got the wrong route or traffic is truly something horrendous.

More commonly, driving to a restaurant named X in neighborhood B rather than the restaurant X in neighborhood A, which I have done before.

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