Incidental learning of links during navigation: the role of visuo-spatial capacity.

We investigated the impact of readers' visuo-spatial (VS) capacity on their incidental learning of page links during the exploration of simple hierarchical hypertextual documents. Forty-three university students were asked to explore a series of hypertexts for a limited period of time. Then the participants were asked to recall the layout and the contents of the pages. We found that low VS capacity readers had more difficulty recalling the links located at a deeper level in the page hierarchy. A content map included in half the trials had a limited effect on recall accuracy. We conclude that reading networked digital documents taps VS working memory, possibly due to readers’ attempts to construct a topological representation of the network that coexists with the semantic representation of the contents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]