Effect of Cognitive Style on Topographical Learning Across Life Span: Insights From Normal Development

Abstract

Notwithstanding its well‐established role on high‐demanding spatial navigation tasks during adulthood, the effect of field dependence–independence during the acquisition of spatial navigation skills is almost unknown. This study assessed for the first time the effect of field dependence–independence on topographical learning (TL) across the life span: 195 individuals, including 54 healthy young‐adults (age‐range = 20–30), 46 teenagers (age‐range = 11–14), and 95 children (age‐range = 6–9) participated in this study. Field dependence–independence interacted with age in predicting TL. Also during childhood higher field independence was associated with better performances but not later in the life, that is, during adolescence and adulthood. This result suggests that field dependence–independence may have a role in fostering the acquisition of TL.

Path Learning in Individuals With Down Syndrome: The Floor Matrix Task and the Role of Individual Visuo-Spatial Measures

“…Other studies found additional cognitive abilities involved in path learning (again after exploring VE), including attention, perception, memory and executive functions (Purser et al, 2012;Nys et al, 2015). There is also evidence of 6 year old performance in the WalCT being related to individual visuo-spatial factors, such as field-independent cognitive style (Boccia et al, 2019), and even verbal abilities (such as grammar comprehension, when the squares used in the WalCT are identified with images reproducing landmarks; Piccardi et al, 2015).…”

Do Advanced Spatial Strategies Depend on the Number of Flight Hours? The Case of Military Pilots

“…Among the external factors are environmental configuration, landmark visual accessibility, circulation systems and signage [5,6]. In contrast, internal factors include the individual's inclination to capture some environmental information instead of other (field dependence/independence [7][8][9][10][11]), gender [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19], age [20][21][22][23][24][25], familiarity with the environment and job-related expertise [4,[26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33]. Internal factors can also include the navigational strategies that the individual prefers to use to navigate.…”

The contribution of field independence in virtual spatial updating

“…In this vein, when people have the possibility to learn a path without a time limit, both men and women are good at performing directional judgments irrespective of the learning orientation (e.g., Nori et al 2015a;Nori et al 2018): allowing longer duration of familiarization and more practice repetitions for females than males markedly reduced gender differences (e.g., Nori et al, 2018). Specifically, we hypothesized that FI cognitive style (Witkin 1950) would reduce the encoding alignment effect as assessed by the VR-WalCT (Nori et al 2015a;Nori et al 2015b): FI individuals are usually more accurate and faster in perspective-taking tasks (Boccia et al 2016;Boccia et al 2019), due to the well-documented ability to rely on an internal frame of reference to cope with cognitive restructuring (i.e., disembedding and perspectivism). In other words, we hypothesized that FI cognitive style predicts better performance in the VR-WalCT task, especially when spatial updating is required, namely, when the spatial positions must be retrieved from a different perspective of a remote encoding path.…”