Orienteering practice: how does it relate to visuospatial individual factors?

Background and Aim: Orienteering is a sport that involves navigating in the environment. As the ability to navigate is associated with individual visuospatial factors (e.g. Hegarty et al. 2006; Pazzaglia et al. 2018), it is worth examining how orienteering practice relates to people’s visuospatial abilities, wayfinding attitudes, everyday spatial habits, and environment knowledge acquisition (e.g. from a map). Methods: Our study sample consisted of three groups: 17 orienteering experts (E), and 17 beginners (B), selected by their years of practice and number of competitions entered, and 17 controls (C) engaging in physical activities for leisure. Participants completed visuospatial cognitive tasks, answered questionnaires on their wayfinding attitudes and everyday spatial habits, and were assessed on their recall of information learned from a map. Results: A Bayesian analysis showed that group E (compared with group C): (1) scored higher in spatial visualization and rotation tasks; (2) tended more to report a good sense of direction, and a knowledge and use of cardinal points; (3) preferred to use maps in everyday displacements; and (4) recalled information learned from a map more accurately. For some measures, group E fared better than group B, and group B fared better than group C. Conclusion: Our results point to the benefits of orienteering practice on visuospatial abilities, wayfinding attitudes (especially as concerns extrinsic frames of reference), spatial habits, and learning from a map. These results contribute to clarifying the association between navigation experience gained by orienteering and individual visuospatial factors.