Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Collaborative spatial problem solving is an important yet not thoroughly examined task. Participants navigatedindividually and in dyads through virtual cities of varying complexity. They only saw the environment part visible from theircurrent location from a bird’s eye view map perspective. We recorded missed target locations, overall trajectory length andsearch time per person until self-indicating whole coverage. Our results show a general increase in missed locations, trajectorylength, and search time with the complexity of the environment. These increases differed due to individual and collaborativesearch. For complex, but not for simple environments individual participants navigated shorter distances, finished earlier, butalso missed more target locations than when searching the same environments in collaboration. These results indicate that incomplex environments collaborative search is less error prone than individual search, but takes longer. Such initial findings willconstrain future theorizing about collaborative spatial problem solving.