Sara Irina Fabrikant is a professor of geography, leading the Geographic Information Visualization and Analysis (GIVA) group at the GIScience Center of the Geography Department at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Humans have relied on navigation aids to support their mobility needs for millenia. Increasing dependence on GPS-enabled navigation devices has already shown to affect the attentional engagement with the traversed environment and to diminish innate spatial abilities of the current highly mobile information citizen. To counter deskilling of spatial abilities that are critical for human survival, we propose a new frontier for adaptive mobile cartography. This neuro-cognitive approach involves the development of mobile geographic information displays (mGIDs) that dynamically adapt to users’ cognitive load and visuospatial attention in real time. Such future neuro-adaptive navigation aids are designed not only to support efficient and safe navigation, but also to actively mitigate spatial deskilling.