Individual Differences in Navigation Skill: Towards Reliable and Valid Measures

Even though successful navigation is vital for survival, individuals vary widely in their navigation skills. Although researchers have examined the correlates of such variation, the accumulation of knowledge is hindered by the variety of paradigms used. We know little about the relation among them, and their validity for real-world behaviors. In this study, we assessed encoding of environmental features in one real-world and two virtual environments. 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 unique variance associated with each paradigm, as well as cross-factor (cross-paradigm) relations. Mental rotation and perspective taking tasks correlated with individual differences, although differently for different paradigms. The data suggest that (a) virtual measures correlate with real-world ones, (b) there is common variance across paradigms, (c) there is also unique paradigm-specific variation, and (d) the specific tasks used (pointing, map building, shortest route finding) are less important. Future research should use multiple paradigms to achieve reliable assessments.