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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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Individual differences in navigation skill: towards reliable and valid measures
Abstract Even though successful navigation is vital for survival, individuals vary widely in their navigation skills. Researchers have examined the correlates of such variation using a wide variety of paradigms. However, we know little about the relation among the paradigms used, and their validity for real-world behaviors. In this study, we assessed 94 young adult participants’ encoding of environmental features in one real-world and two virtual environments (or paradigms), using a within-subjects design. Each paradigm involved building a map from memory and pointing to the location of objects while standing at different locations in the environment. Two of the paradigms also used a route efficiency task in which participants aimed to take the shortest possible path to a target object. Factor analysis showed shared and unique variance in individual’s performance associated with each paradigm. Mental rotation and perspective taking tasks correlated with navigation performance differently for different paradigms. The data suggest that (1) virtual measures correlate with real-world ones, (2) the specific tasks used (pointing, map building, shortest route finding) are less important than the paradigm, and (3) there is common variance (i.e., shared individual differences) across paradigms. However, there is also unique paradigm-specific variation. Future research should use multiple paradigms to achieve reliable and valid assessments, ideally with shorter tasks for each.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2300937
- PAR ID:
- 10598621
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer Science + Business Media
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications
- Volume:
- 10
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2365-7464
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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