Cognitive Styles: Errors in Directional Judgments

Abstract

Previous studies on spatial memory have shown that, in judging direction, participants are more accurate and faster when a map is aligned with the perspective of the spatial layout they had learned (alignment effect). Rossano and Warren (1989 Perception 18 215-229) have shown that when participants have to do a contra-aligned judgment they can either answer correctly, or make alignment or mirror-image errors. We think that the kind of response depends on the different way in which people acquire environmental knowledge: landmark, route, and survey. We hypothesise that landmark and route participants show alignment effects and make, respectively, alignment errors and mirror-image errors, whereas survey participants do not show an alignment effect. An experiment is reported in which participants performed three tasks in order to distinguish their cognitive style. We selected thirty landmark, thirty route, and twenty-eight survey participants. They were then submitted to directional judgment tasks to verify whether the alignment effect was present and to observe the kind of responses. The results revealed that survey participants did not show an alignment effect, and that the kind of errors could depend on the directional judgment task participants had to do, and not only on the cognitive style.

Perspective changing in WalCT and VR-WalCT: A gender difference study [WalCT – VR-WalCT: Gender differences]

“…Likely, a possible explanation could be related to the task participants had to perform: the alignment effect is usually investigated by pointing tasks (e.g., McNamara & Kelly, 2010;Nori & Giusberti, 2003;Nori et al, 2006) rather than remembering a path from different perspectives. It could be possible that the sequence of landmarks along the path permits an online updating of spatial information that simplifies the recall process.…”

“…But in certain circumstances the effect of orientation dependence does not occur or does not alter the performance or mitigate it. There are various factors that contribute to the disappearance or the reduction of the alignment effect: familiarity with the environment (Nori & Piccardi, 2011;Piccardi et al, 2011aPiccardi et al, , 2011b, environmental characteristics (Sholl & Nolin, 1997), the motor, proprioceptive and vestibular information (Richardson, Montello, & Hegarty, 1999;Rossano, West, Robertson, Wayne, & Chase, 1999;Sun, Campos, & Chan, 2004), primary learning (Presson & Hazelrigg, 1984) and the strategies or spatial cognitive style used to acquire spatial information (Nori & Giusberti, 2003;Nori et al, 2006;Rossano, Warren, & Kenan, 1995). Regardless of the way spatial information is learned, women seem to be less proficient than men in orienting themselves during navigation (e.g., Halpern, 2000).…”

Perspective changing in primary and secondary learning: A gender difference study

“…Learning time is a critical characteristic of perspective changing studies. Generally, participants were given about 30 seconds to learn the map in SL (e.g., Mou & McNamara, 2002;Nori & Giusberti, 2003;Presson & Hazelrigg, 1984) or were guided by the examiner along the path only three times in PL (e.g., Féry & Magnac, 2000;Nori et al, 2006;Presson & Hazelrigg, 1984). When participants had no time limit during the learning phase, on average their learning time was about 80 seconds (see Nori, Iachini, & Giusberti, 2004).…”

“…It is composed of 11 Likert-type items, which participants have to respond by crossing out a number from 1 (very poor) to 5 (excellent), concerning: general sense of direction (SOD), knowledge and use of cardinal points, survey, route or landmark-centered representations which are obtained by summing items 3b + 4c; 3a + 4b; and 3c + 4a, respectively. To label individual spatial strategies we adopted that of Nori and Giusberti (2003). For instance, to be labeled as "landmark", participants' scores had to reflect an 80% preference for the landmark style with less than 50% of preferences on route and survey questions.…”

Spatial mental representations derived from survey and route descriptions: When individuals prefer extrinsic frame of reference

“…Gender and group were considered as independent variables. All participants performed a series of visuo-spatial tasks: geographical pointing tasks -places within and outside the city (i.e., Padua) -, MRT (Vandenberg & Kuse, 1978), Spatial Indication Task (Nori & Giusberti, 2003), Visual task (Nori & Giusberti, 2003) and a visuo-spatial WM task, the Corsi Block task (Corsi, 1972) in forward and backward versions. They also performed two verbal tasks: reading comprehension task (Cornoldi, Rizzo, & Pra Baldi, 1991) and the Digit span (Wechsler, 1981).…”