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…

Valued-based decision-making has been studied for decades in myriad topics such as consumer spending and gambling, but very rarely in spatial navigation despite the link between the two being highly relevant to survival. Furthermore, how people integrate episodic memories, and what factors are related to the extent of memory integration in…

Relying on shared tasks and stimuli to conduct research can enhance the replicability of findings and allow a community of researchers to collect large data sets across multiple experiments. This approach is particularly relevant for experiments in spatial navigation, which often require the development of unfamiliar large-scale virtual…

Students learn more effectively through repeated retrieval of study materials relative to repeated exposure to the materials, a phenomenon known as the "testing effect" or "retrieval practice". This pattern has been demonstrated repeatedly with verbal materials, and more recently with visuospatial materials. The extent to which…

Background: Reference frames ground spatial communication by mapping ambiguous language (for example, navigation: "to the left") to properties of the speaker (using a Relative reference frame: "to my left") or the world (Absolute reference frame: "to the north"). People's preferences for reference frame vary depending…

Spatial ability is a powerful systematic source of individual differences in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and technology (STEM). Abundant research has evidenced that psychometrically assessed spatial ability is a strong predictor of STEM achievement. However, its underlying cognitive process and relevant role in STEM education…

The skill of spatial learning and orientation is fundamental in humans and differs widely among individuals. Despite its importance, however, the malleability of this skill through practice has scarcely been studied empirically, in contrast to psychometric spatial ability. Thus, this article examines the possibility of improving the accuracy of…

Although the hippocampus is implicated in both spatial navigation and associative memory, very little is known about whether individual differences in the 2 domains covary. People who prefer to navigate using a hippocampal-dependent place strategy may show better performance on associative memory tasks than those who prefer a caudate-dependent…

There are marked individual differences in the formation of cognitive maps both in the real world and in virtual environments (VE; e.g., Blajenkova, Motes, & Kozhevnikov, 2005; Chai & Jacobs, 2010; Ishikawa & Montello, 2006; Wen, Ishikawa, & Sato, 2011). These differences, however, are poorly understood and can be difficult to…

Research on the existence of cognitive maps and on the cognitive processes that support effective navigation has often focused on functioning across individuals. However, there are pronounced individual differences in navigation proficiency, which need to be explained and which can illuminate our understanding of cognitive maps and effective…

This study examined how different components of working memory are involved in the acquisition of egocentric and allocentric survey knowledge by people with a good and poor sense of direction (SOD). We employed a dual-task method and asked participants to learn routes from videos with verbal, visual, and spatial interference tasks and without any…

The relationship between emergent spatial understanding in different cognitive domains, including navigation and language, has rarely been studied using methods that allow for the examination of individual differences. In this study the authors explored emergent place learning and its relationship to early spatial language, namely prepositions, in…

The aim of this article is to show that individuals differ in the way they solve spatial tasks of all kinds, and both research on and measurement of spatial ability could profit from an integration of strategy aspects. We first review evidence for both intra- and inter-individual strategy differences (including gender differences) in 3 domains of…

This experimental study investigated internal (psychological characteristics) and external (World Wide Web site features) factors influencing learning and disorientation in Web navigation. The research design was a two-factors ANOVA (ANalysis Of VAriance) with mode of navigation (linear, nonlinear) and distracters (i.e., the presence of…