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Human orientation in novel and familiar environments is a complex skill that can involve numerous different strategies. To date, a comprehensive account of how these strategies interrelate at the behavioural level has not been documented, impeding the development of elaborate systems neuroscience models of spatial orientation. Here, we describe a virtual environment test battery designed to assess five of the core strategies used by humans to orient. Our results indicate that the ability to form a cognitive map is highly related to more basic orientation strategies, supporting previous proposals that encoding a cognitive map requires inputs from multiple domains of spatial processing. These findings provide a topology of numerous primary orientation strategies used by humans during orientation and will allow researchers to elaborate on neural models of spatial cognition that currently do not account for how different orientation strategies integrate over time based on environmental conditions.

The structure of the physical environment can have a significant influence on individuals' ability to orient within it. We asked participants to perform a cued wayfinding task in two virtual environments to test the hypothesis that spatial orientation skills are indeed affected by the physical complexity of the environment. The two virtual environments used for testing differed solely in one objective measure of plan complexity, that is, the average number of connections at each decision point or terminal corridor. Our results showed that participants committed more errors and took longer to reach their destinations in the more interconnected environment. Performance was more efficient on trials in which participants were able to use previously learned routes relative to trials in which participants were forced to plan novel routes. These findings provide strong evidence that people's ability to navigate in unfamiliar surroundings is affected by the layout complexity of the environment.