We investigated the contribution of visual imagination to the cognitive mapping of a building when initial exploration was simulated either visually by using a passive video walk-through, or mentally by using verbal guidance. Building layout had repeating elements with either rotational or mirror symmetry. Cognitive mapping of the virtual building, determined using questionnaires and map drawings, was present following verbal guidance but inferior to that following video guidance. Mapping was not affected by the building's structural symmetry. However, notably, it correlated with small-scale mental rotation scores for both video and verbal guidance conditions. There was no difference between males and females. A common factor that may have influenced cognitive mapping was the availability of visual information about the relationships of the building elements, either directly perceived (during the video walk-through) or imagined (during the verbal walk-through and/or during recall). Differences in visual imagination, particularly mental rotation, may thus account for some of the individual variance in cognitive mapping of complex built environments, which is relevant to how designers provide navigation-relevant information.

Since the beginning of the coronavirus (COVID-19) global pandemic, digital contact-tracing applications (apps) have been at the centre of attention as a digital tool to enable citizens to monitor their social distancing, which appears to be one of the leading practices for mitigating the spread of airborne infectious diseases. Many countries have been working towards developing suitable digital contact-tracing apps to allow the measurement of the physical distance between citizens and to alert them when contact with an infected individual has occurred. However, the adoption of digital contact-tracing apps has faced several challenges so far, including interoperability between mobile devices and users' privacy concerns. There is a need to reach a trade-off between the achievable technical performance of new technology, false-positive rates, and social and behavioural factors. This paper reviews a wide range of factors and classifies them into three categories of technical, epidemiological and social ones, and incorporates these into a compact mathematical model. The paper evaluates the effectiveness of digital contact-tracing apps based on received signal strength measurements. The results highlight the limitations, potential and challenges of the adoption of digital contact-tracing apps.