Knowledge of familiar environments: Assessing modalities and individual visuo-spatial factors

Familiarity enables us to form elaborate mental representations of environments, which are usually assessed with tasks that involve managing spatial information (such as pointing and locating landmarks). The present study also examines the role of familiarity using a “field” task that involved finding the shortest way to a destination, and the contribution of individual visuo-spatial factors (a set of abilities, preferences and strategies). Undergraduates more or less familiar with their university campus (45 in each group) performed pointing and landmark-locating (spatial information managing) tasks, and a shortest path finding task, and were administered several visuo-spatial measures. The results showed that familiarity had no effect on spatial information managing performance, but did influence shortest path finding. Individual visuo-spatial factors variously supported pointing accuracy, and shortest path finding performance. These results broaden our knowledge of how individual factors (familiarity and visuo-spatial abilities, preferences and strategies) jointly support the knowledge of an environment.