Maps or analogies? A comparison of instructional aids for menu navigation

The relative efficacy of a variety of spatial maps and analogies as instructional aids for the learning and navigation of hierachical data bases is studied. Subjects performed single- and multinode retrieval tasks with novel data bases. The results of one experiment indicated that subjects who studied an analogy prior to performing data-retrieval tasks were less affected by increasing search distance than were subjects who studied a spatial map. The second experiment suggested that the benefits of analogy relative to other instructional aids increased as time passed between initial instruction and interaction with the data base.