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Abstract External representations powerfully support and augment complex human behavior. When navigating, people often consult external representations to help them find the way to go, but do maps or verbal instructions improve spatial knowledge or support effective wayfinding? Here, we examine spatial knowledge with and without external representations in two studies where participants learn a complex virtual environment. In the first study, we asked participants to generate their own maps or verbal instructions, partway through learning. We found no evidence of improved spatial knowledge in a pointing task requiring participants to infer the direction between two targets, either on the same route or on different routes, and no differences between groups in accurately recreating a map of the target landmarks. However, as a methodological note, pointing was correlated with the accuracy of the maps that participants drew. In the second study, participants had access to an accurate map or set of verbal instructions that they could study while learning the layout of target landmarks. Again, we found no evidence of differentially improved spatial knowledge in the pointing task, although we did find that the map group could recreate a map of the target landmarks more accurately. However, overall improvement was high. There was evidence that the nature of improvement across all conditions was specific to initial navigation ability levels. Our findings add to a mixed literature on the role of external representations for navigation and suggest that more substantial intervention—more scaffolding, explicit training, enhanced visualization, perhaps with personalized sequencing—may be necessary to improve navigation ability.
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Measuring configural spatial knowledge: Individual differences in correlations between pointing and shortcutting
Abstract People use environmental knowledge to maintain a sense of direction in daily life. This knowledge is typically measured by having people point to unseen locations (judgments of relative direction) or navigate efficiently in the environment (shortcutting). Some people can estimate directions precisely, while others point randomly. Similarly, some people take shortcuts not experienced during learning, while others mainly follow learned paths. Notably, few studies have directly tested the correlation between pointing and shortcutting performance. We compared pointing and shortcutting in two experiments, one using desktop virtual reality (VR) (N = 57) and one using immersive VR (N = 48). Participants learned a new environment by following a fixed route and were then asked to point to unseen locations and navigate to targets by the shortest path. Participants’ performance was clustered into two groups using K-means clustering. One (lower ability) group pointed randomly and showed low internal consistency across trials in pointing, but were able to find efficient routes, and their pointing and efficiency scores were not correlated. The others (higher ability) pointed precisely, navigated by efficient routes, and their pointing and efficiency scores were correlated. These results suggest that with the same egocentric learning experience, the correlation between pointing and shortcutting depends on participants’ learning ability, and internal consistency and discriminating power of the measures. Inconsistency and limited discriminating power can lead to low correlations and mask factors driving human variation. Psychometric properties, largely under-reported in spatial cognition, can advance our understanding of individual differences and cognitive processes for complex spatial tasks.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2024633
- PAR ID:
- 10466004
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
- ISSN:
- 1069-9384
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02266-6
