Self‐ratings of sense of direction and route reversal performance

Abstract

One of the most pervasive beliefs about human way finding is that some people have a natural ability that distinguishes them from others. In this research, we asked children and adults to rate their own sense of direction, a promising index of orientation skills despite its simplicity and reliance on selfassessment. Ratings were obtained before and after reversal of a newly learned outdoor route. Selfratings by children and adults before route reversal only weakly predicted two of a variety of measures of route and bearing knowledge. However, adults' ratings after the route reversal reflected performance on almost all of these same measures. In addition, route reversal performance was easily improved by instructing children and adults during route acquisition to look back in anticipation of the return. The pattern of results suggests that way finders' beliefs about their sense of direction are based on a recollection of the outcomes of the attentive and mnemonic strategies they use.People who are good at everyday way finding tasks often believe that they have a good sense of direction. Kozlowski and Bryant (1977) attempted to quantify this belief and examine its validity. Responding to a scale, university students selected a 1 if they felt their sense of direction was poor and higher values if they felt it was better. What was meant by sense of direction was left to the intuitions of the rater. The ratings were consistent when the same students were asked after intervals of 2 weeks to 3 months. In addition, there were moderate to high correlations between ratings of sense of direction and the ability to point to and estimate the distance to familiar buildings from an imagined vantage point on their campus.The implication of these correlations, however, has been disputed. Passini (1984) has argued that these correlations may simply reflect that self-evaluation of sense of direction is based on self-evaluation of environmental knowledge; the correlations do not assess the prediction that a person with a good sense of direction can easily orient themselves in novel environments. Consistent with this criticism, Kozlowski and Bryant (1977) found no initial difference between students who rated themselves with either a good or poor sense of direction when pointing to locations in an unfamiliar underground tunnel complex. Students who rated themselves with a good sense of direction showed improvements in

Walking and Walkability: Is Wayfinding a Missing Link? Implications for Public Health Practice

“…43–45 Lack of ability to move through environment, lack of perceptual ability, and memory problems can impair knowledge acquisition and therefore wayfinding ability. Studies have found associations between worse wayfinding performance of various kinds and early childhood, 46–48 old age, 25,49–57 visual impairment, 58,59 cognitive impairment, 60,61 or female sex. 25,62–68 Wayfinding can be further impeded by transient environmental conditions that compromise information gathering such as poor visibility, bad weather, construction, darkness, or sensory overload or even by stressful frames of mind.…”

“…35 Wayfinding is aided when landmarks are visible over short distances 91 and located at decision points, such as intersections. 57,92 Pedestrians may attend to nearby or distant landmarks, depending on personal preference or environmental conditions. In a virtual wayfinding experiment, some pedestrians relied almost entirely on nearby landmarks, indicating a route orientation (eg, turn right at the ferry building), whereas others focused almost entirely on distant landmarks providing survey orientation (eg, go north).…”

Variations in cognitive maps: Understanding individual differences in navigation.

“…First, in self-reporting navigation ability, participants may sample from a small number of recent events. Heth, Cornell, and Flood (2002) found that self-report sense of direction was correlated with performance on a route-reversal task when the SBSOD was completed after, but not before, the navigation task. Second, self-report measures are unlikely to be reliable for measuring improvement or change in navigation ability, because people are likely to regard their sense of direction as a stable trait or be unaware of gradual or relatively small changes.…”

Spatial navigation: Cognitive variables involved in route retracing among an elderly population

“…The impact of this change of perspective on route retracing performance has been demonstrated in several behavioural studies. For example, looking back during route repetition to anticipate the different perspectives of an intersection improves performance in return, both in children and adults (Cornell, Heth, & Rowat, 1992;Heth, Cornell, & Flood, 2002). Thus, on the return route the individual perception of landmarks and their layout is modified, and this information must be restructured.…”