Individual differences in navigation skill: towards reliable and valid measures

• Published in: Cognitive research: principles and implications Vol. 10; no. 1; pp. 27 - 20
• Main Authors: Lader, Jacob L., Nguyen, Kim V., Newcombe, Nora S.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 07.06.2025; Springer Nature B.V; SpringerOpen
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Behavioral Science and Psychology; Cognitive Psychology; Confirmatory factor analysis; Discriminant analysis; Experimental Psychology; Factor analysis; Female; Humans; Individual Differences; Individuality; Male; Mental task performance; Navigation; Navigation behavior; Neurosciences; Original; Original Article; Paradigms; Perspective Taking; Psychology; Psychomotor Performance - physiology; Reproducibility of Results; Skills; Space Perception - physiology; Spatial cognition; Spatial Navigation - physiology; Virtual environment; Virtual Reality; Young Adult; Young adults; Confirmatory factor analysis; Navigation; Virtual environment; Spatial cognition; Individual differences
• ISSN: 2365-7464; 2365-7464
• DOI: 10.1186/s41235-025-00642-5

Even though successful navigation is vital for survival, individuals vary widely in their navigation skills. Researchers have examined the correlates of such variation using a wide variety of paradigms. However, we know little about the relation among the paradigms used, and their validity for real-world behaviors. In this study, we assessed 94 young adult participants’ encoding of environmental features in one real-world and two virtual environments (or paradigms), using a within-subjects design. Each paradigm involved building a map from memory and pointing to the location of objects while standing at different locations in the environment. Two of the paradigms also used a route efficiency task in which participants aimed to take the shortest possible path to a target object. Factor analysis showed shared and unique variance in individual’s performance associated with each paradigm. Mental rotation and perspective taking tasks correlated with navigation performance differently for different paradigms. The data suggest that (1) virtual measures correlate with real-world ones, (2) the specific tasks used (pointing, map building, shortest route finding) are less important than the paradigm, and (3) there is common variance (i.e., shared individual differences) across paradigms. However, there is also unique paradigm-specific variation. Future research should use multiple paradigms to achieve reliable and valid assessments, ideally with shorter tasks for each. Significance statement Some people seem never to get lost, whereas others seem never to know exactly where they are, even in familiar territory. To understand the roots of these differences, and how to support poor navigators to develop better skills, we need to measure their ability. However, it is unclear whether we can assess navigation ability as a single dimension or whether there are several relevant dimensions, if skill(s) are uniform across environments, and whether virtual assessments relate to real-world behavior. Here, we evaluate these issues and provide evidence that, while navigation ability reflects important paradigm-specific contextual variance, there is also common variance at the paradigm level, including virtual and real-world. This finding suggests a common underlying cognitive component of spatial navigation that generalizes between paradigms but that is not fully explained only by the paradigm’s environments, modalities (e.g., virtual or real-world), or tasks. Future work should use more than one paradigm to ensure reliable and valid measures.