Navigational spatial displays: The role of metacognition as cognitive load

One hundred and six undergraduates searched a hypermedia environment under three navigational conditions, wrote an essay measuring their comprehension, and completed a test of metacognition. The map conditions were spatial/semantic, spatial only, and none. Analyses revealed that a navigational map capable of incurring an integrative cognitive model of the meaningful relationships underlying website content incurs significantly more metacognitive load and higher levels of comprehension. When the map was incapable of revealing these relationships, metacognitive skills were of no value and compromised learning performance. The results demonstrate that a navigational map can create significantly more cognitive load; however, the nature of the load—whether germane or extraneous—is based on the degree to which the map permits integrative model construction during processing.