Spatial cognition and navigation are essential and complex abilities that we use in everyday life. Our research investigates how we mentally represent space, navigate through it, and how individual differences and environmental characteristics relate to these processes
Spatial navigation
Successful navigation and orientation are essential in daily life. Spatial abilities, experiences, strategies, beliefs, attitudes, and emotions are among the individual factors that impact our navigation ability.
Main topics:
- Gender and age
Gender differences in favor of men have been shown in various spatial recall tasks, especially those requiring allocentric knowledge. However, the literature has shown mixed results. Some evidence suggests that differences in wayfinding abilities between women and men may be explained not only by gender itself, but also by personality traits and affective factors.
Research on aging across the adult lifespan generally indicates a decline in spatial performance, although findings vary depending on several factors, including the type of knowledge assessed and visuospatial factors.
- Visuospatial abilities and wayfinding inclinations
Navigation ability is related to objective cognitive abilities, such as mental rotation skills and perspective-taking abilities. In particular, visuospatial working memory has been found to be fundamental for acquiring survey knowledge of the environment through both route-following and free exploration.
Navigation ability is also associated with subjective factors. These include emotional and motivational aspects (e.g., spatial self-efficacy, spatial anxiety, and pleasure in exploring places) as well as beliefs (e.g., growth mindset and gender stereotypes), which have been shown to predict navigation performance.
Navigation aids
Successful navigation and orientation are supported by the use of external aids, such as (digital) maps, GPS navigation apps, and verbal directions
- The use of GPS navigation apps
A systematic review and meta-analysis demonstrated that wayfinding performance is supported by the use of GPS navigation apps. However, their use has a negative impact on the environmental knowledge acquired during navigation.
Therefore, understanding more strategic ways of using GPS navigation apps appears to be important.
- Spatial learning and recall from (digital) maps and verbal descriptions
Understanding the individual factors, such as a person’s emotions, that are associated with learning from maps and verbal descriptions is important for gaining insight into how and under what conditions navigation aids are effective.
Spatial cognition and sports
- There are conditions that may boost visuospatial and navigation abilities. One of these seems to be practicing a sport or activities involving outdoor navigation (e.g. judo, orienteering, speleology).