Learning the layout of different environments: common or dissociated abilities?

Abstract

People navigate in various types of spaces, including indoor and outdoor environments. These differ in availability of navigational cues, such as distal landmarks, clear boundaries, and regular grid structures. Does learning the layout of different types of environments rely on the same or diverse cognitive abilities? Do separate measures of learning reflect different abilities? In a study of individual differences, 88 people learned the layout of two virtual environments from first person experience: a grid-like maze, and a campus-like open environment. After learning each environment, their knowledge was measured by three tasks; onsite pointing, map-reconstruction, and wayfinding. Performance on these measures was significantly correlated. In confirmatory factor analyses, the best fitting model indicated separate factors for spatial knowledge acquisition of the grid-like maze and the outdoor open environment. However, these two factors also shared considerable variance, indicating that they reflect a common underlying ability. There was no evidence that different measures of learning (pointing, map reconstruction, and wayfinding) defined separate abilities, adding to their validity as alternative measures of configural knowledge. Performance of map-based navigation and path integration in the mobile navigation game Sea Hero Quest was generally not correlated with performance in the environment learning tasks, nor were self-report measures of sense of direction and spatial anxiety. Our research suggests that there is a common ability related to learning spatial layout in different contexts, but this may be distinct from other navigation abilities.