Search Strategies in Hypermedia Navigation and Spatial Abilities: A Comparison with Physical Navigation

This article focuses on spatial abilities mobilized during hypertext navigation. Based on the evidence that spatial cognition plays a central role in navigation, we present an experiment involving information search tasks both in physical environment and in hypermedia environment.We investigate how us- ers make use of their spatial abilities to search information in hypermedia, by comparing their performances in hypermedia navigation and physical naviga- tion. As data collection and analysis are still in progress, we present preliminary results based on available data