A fundamental problem in geospatial interface designs is how aspects of user cognition may be incorporated into their design structures for improved reasoning, decision making, and comprehension in geographic spaces. Narrative environments are one such example of geographic spaces, where stories are told and visually displayed. Recently, geospatial narrative environments have become a popular medium for visualising information about space and time in the Earth sciences. Consequently, effective ways of enhancing user cognition in these environments through visual narrative comprehension is becoming increasingly important, particularly for the development of interactive learning environments for geo-education. It was hoped that subtle visualisations of future tasks (environmental precues) could be incorporated into an ambient narrative interface that would improve user cognition and decision making in an immersive 3D virtual narrative environment, which acted as an experimental analogue for how the interface could operate in extended reality (XR) environments. To address this, a hybrid navigational interface called Future Vision was developed. In addition to controller-based locomotion, the interface provides subliminal environmental precues in the form of simulated future thoughts by teleporting the user to a future location, where the outcome of a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) decision making task could be briefly seen. The navigational effectiveness of the interface was analysed using the Steering Law: a geographic analysis technique for trajectory-based human-computer interactions. The results showed that Future Vision enhanced participants’ navigational abilities through statistically significant improvements in average task completion times and movement speed. When comparing the experimental interface (Future Vision) with the control interface (an HTC Vive controller), the results showed that the experimental interface was 2.9 times as effective for navigation. Improvements were also seen in the 2AFC decision making task when compared to participants in the control group (who were unguided in their decision making). These were close to significance, and provided weak evidence that Future Vision improved participants’ 2AFC decision making . Improvements in decision making occurred even when participants reported being unaware of the precues. In addition, Future Vision produced a similar information transfer rate to brain-computer interfaces in virtual reality, where participants move virtual objects via motor imagery and the imagined performance of actions through thought. This suggests that visualisations of future thoughts operate in a motor imagery paradigm that is associated with the generation and execution of a user’s goals and intentions. The results also suggest that Future Vision behaves as an optimally designed cognitive user interface for ambient narrative communication during navigation and decision making. Overall, these findings demonstrate how XR narrative-style GIS digital representations may be incorporated into cognitively inspired geospatial interfaces. When employed in real or virtual geographic narrative environments, these interfaces may allow for new types of quantitative GIS analysis techniques to be carried out in the cognitive sciences, leading to insights that may result in improved geospatial interface designs in the future.