Analysing the effect of tangibile user interfaces on spatial memory

Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) allow for effective and easy interaction with digital information by encapsulating them into a physical form. Especially in combination with interactive surfaces, TUIs have been studied in a variety of forms and application cases. By taking advantage of the human abilities to grasp and manipulate they ease collaboration and learning. In this paper we study the effects of TUIs on spatial memory. In our study we compare participants' performance of recalling positions of buildings that they priorly placed on an interactive tabletop either using a TUI or a touch-based GUI. While 83,3% of the participants reported in their self assessment that they performed better in recalling the positions when using the GUI our results show that participants were on an average 24.5% more accurate when using the TUI.