Individual Differences in Navigation Ability and Strategy

Large Scale Spatial Ability:

Large scale or environmental spatial ability is important for everyday navigation tasks, such as learning the layout of a new place, maintaining a sense of direction and location while moving around an environment, finding our way to places we need to visit, and returning home at the end of the day. Despite the essential nature of spatial navigation, we all know people with an excellent sense of direction while others readily claim that they have no sense of direction. The Spatial Thinking Lab is concerned with understanding individual differences in navigation at both the cognitive and neural levels (Wolbers & Hegarty, 2010). For a summary of the lab's work on navigation, please see Professor Hegarty's talk on individual differences in navigation ability, part of a series by the Royal Institute of Navigation.

In past research on this topic, we examined the relations between large-scale spatial abilities used in learning spatial layout and small-scale spatial abilities, such as mental rotation (Hegarty, Montello, Richardson, Ishikawa, & Lovelace, 2006). We also developed new measures related to large-scale spatial spatial abilities including the Santa Barbara Sense-of-Direction Scale (Hegarty, Richardson, Montello, Lovelace, & Subbiah, 2002) and the Spatial Orientation test (Friedman, Kohler, Gunalp, Boone & Hegarty, 2019; Hegarty & Waller, 2004). Previous work in our lab has also investigated the spatial cues that support navigation and orientation in known environments (Burte & Hegarty, 2012; 2013).

Current research is focused on determinants of navigation strategies, for example, why some people navigate by familiar routes, whereas others use their knowledge of the layout of environments to take shortcuts to goal locations (Boone, Gong, & Hegarty, 2018; Boone, Maghen, & Hegarty, 2019). In a recent Ph.D. dissertation conducted in the lab, Alexander Boone examined the role of stress in spatial navigation strategies, which becomes relevant for understanding navigation in emergency situations.

Using navigation tasks in both virtual and real environments, we are studying a variety of mechanisms underlying individual differences in navigation performance and strategies (see Hegarty, Burte & Boone, 2019). Carol (Chuanxiuyue) He, a current graduate student in the lab, has taken the lead on studies of how growth mindset and spatial anxiety affect navigation ability (He & Hegarty, 2020). In her current work, she is studying how spatial attributes, such as global environmental geometry influence performance in different navigation tasks, including wayfinding and direction estimation. Moreover, she is studying how navigation in immersive and desktop virtual environments compares to navigation in real environments.

In collaboration with Dr. Emily Jacobs (PBS, UCSB) and Professor Elizabeth Chrastil (UC Irvine), we are investigating how navigation abilities and strategies change with age. We are particularly interested in studying navigation across the midlife transition, asking whether early age-related deficits in navigation vary by sex, especially given known changes in navigation-related brain regions during the menopausal transition (Jacobs & Goldstein, 2018). Advances in understanding these age-related changes could be critical for the early detection of individuals at risk for neurodegenerative diseases, before more overt cognitive symptoms arise.

Finally, in a new NSF-funded project, in collaboration with Elizabeth Chrastil, Jeffrey Kritchmar and Craig Stark, University of California, Irvine, we will combine methods and insights from cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience and robotics to understand variation in navigation abilities and strategies. The aims of this study are to 1) test whether human spatial navigation is a singular competence or whether multiple abilities contribute, 2) establish the neural markers of human navigational abilities through multi-modal imaging, and 3) implement and test different navigational abilities in robots in real-world situations.

References:

Boone, A. P., Gong, X., & Hegarty, M. (2018). Sex differences in navigation strategy and efficiency. Memory & Cognition, 46(6), 909-922.

Boone, A. P., Maghen, B., & Hegarty, M. (2019). Instructions matter: Individual differences in navigation strategy and ability. Memory & Cognition, 47(7), 1401-1414.

Burte, H., & Hegarty, M. (2012). Revisiting the relationship between allocentric-heading recall and self-reported sense of direction. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 34, No. 34).

Burte, H., & Hegarty, M. (2013). Individual and strategy differences in an allocentric-heading recall task. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 35, No. 35).

He, C., & Hegarty, M. (2020). How anxiety and growth mindset are linked to navigation ability: Impacts of exploration and GPS use. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 101475.

Friedman, A., Kohler, B., Gunalp, P., Boone, A. P., & Hegarty, M. (2019). A computerized spatial orientation test. Behavior Research Methods, 1-14.

Hegarty, M., Montello, D. R., Richardson, A. E., Ishikawa, T., & Lovelace, K. (2006). Spatial abilities at different scales: Individual differences in aptitude-test performance and spatial-layout learning. Intelligence, 34(2), 151-176.

Hegarty, M., Richardson, A. E., Montello, D. R., Lovelace, K., & Subbiah, I. (2002). Development of a self-report measure of environmental spatial ability. Intelligence, 30(5), 425-447.

Hegarty, M., & Waller, D. (2004). A dissociation between mental rotation and perspective-taking spatial abilities. Intelligence, 32(2), 175-191.

Hegarty, M., & Waller, D. (2005). Individual differences in spatial abilities. The Cambridge Handbook of Visuospatial Thinking, 121-169.

Jacobs, E. G., & Goldstein, J. M. (2018). The middle-aged brain: Biological sex and sex hormones shape memory circuitry. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 23, 84–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2018.03.009

Wolbers, T., & Hegarty, M. (2010). What determines our navigational abilities? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(3), 138-146.