Learning from navigation, and tasks assessing its accuracy: The role of visuospatial abilities and wayfinding inclinations

How individual differences in visuospatial thinking relate to environment learning from navigation is of growing interest and needs to be approached systematically. Here, a sample of 292 undergraduates learnt a virtual path (desktop-based), and their learning accuracy was assessed with recall tasks, i.e. route retracing, shortcut finding and landmark locating tasks. Several individual visuospatial measures, tasks and questionnaires, were administered. Relations between individual measures and recall tasks were estimated with regression models taking quantitative evidence available in the literature into account, and treated as Bayesian informed priors established by a meta-analysis. The results provide robust evidence of visuospatial abilities and wayfinding inclinations (composing two distinct factors) both affecting recall task performance, particularly the former. A different contribution of individual measures as a function of recall task is envisaged. This study offers new insight on the role of individual visuospatial measures in environment learning (navigation-like) and how they are related.