The Neural Basis of Individual Differences in Directional Sense

Individuals differ greatly in their ability to learn and navigate through environments. One potential source of this variation is “directional sense” or the ability to identify, maintain, and compare allocentric headings. Allocentric headings are facing directions that are fixed to the external environment, such as cardinal directions. Measures of the ability to identify and compare allocentric headings, using photographs of familiar environments, have shown significant individual and strategy differences; however, the neural basis of these differences is unclear. Forty-five college students, who were highly familiar with a campus environment and ranged in self-reported sense-of-direction, underwent fMRI scans while they completed the Relative Heading task, in which they had to indicate the direction of a series of photographs of recognizable campus buildings (i.e., “target headings”) with respect to initial “orienting headings.” Large individual differences were found in accuracy and correct decision latencies, with gender, self-reported sense-of-direction, and familiarity with campus buildings all predicting task performance. Using linear mixed models, the directional relationships between headings and the experiment location also impacted performance. Structural scans revealed that lateral orbitofrontal and superior parietal volume were related to task accuracy and decision latency, respectively. Bilateral hippocampus and right presubiculum volume were related to self-reported sense-of-direction. Meanwhile, functional results revealed clusters within the superior parietal lobule, supramarginal gyrus, superior frontal gyrus, lateral orbitofrontal cortex, and caudate among others in which the intensity of activation matched the linear magnitude of the difference between the orienting and target headings. While the retrosplenial cortex and hippocampus have previously been implicated in the coding of allocentric headings, this work revealed that comparing those headings additionally involved frontal and parietal regions. These results provide insights into the neural bases of the variation within human orientation abilities, and ultimately, human navigation

Individual Differences and the Neural Bases of Allocentric-Headings

This video was recorded live at the annual Spatial Lightning Talks on February 25, 2014 at the Mosher Alumni House, UC Santa Barbara. Each speaker was allotted three minutes to present a topic related to space —geographic or otherwise

Individual Differences and the Neural Bases of Allocentric-Headings

This video was recorded live at the annual Spatial Lightning Talks on February 25, 2014 at the Mosher Alumni House, UC Santa Barbara. Each speaker was allotted three minutes to present a topic related to space —geographic or otherwise

Convergent and Discriminant Validity of the Direction and Orientation Strategy Questionnaire

The “Direction and Orientation Strategy Questionnaire” (DOSQ) is a novel assessment based on giving directions around your hometown and how one remains oriented in real-world environments. The DOSQ produces three sub-scale scores: use of allocentric strategies, use of egocentric strategies, and sense-of-direction. Through an online survey, over one hundred Texas A&M undergraduates completed demographic questions, DOSQ, Santa Barbara Sense-of-Direction scale (Hegarty et al., 2002), Wayfinding Strategy Scale (Lawton, 1994), Questionnaire on Survey Representation (Pazzaglia & De Beni, 2006), Spatial Anxiety Scale (Lawton, 1994), and familiarity measures using the Texas A&M campus. Using factor analysis, we found that the DOSQ sub-scores were highly related to other measures of strategy use and sense-of-direction, establishing its convergent validity. DOSQ sub-scales were not related to the spatial anxiety or familiarity measures, establishing its discriminant validity. The DOSQ provides a method for briefly assessing spatial thinking strategies that support navigation through real-world environments

What cognitive biases impact north pointing accuracy when nearby roads are not aligned with the cardinal directions?

When pointing toward north in familiar environments, people tend to point parallel or perpendicular to roads suggesting that individuals may point toward north more accurately when nearby roads are coincidentally aligned with the cardinal directions (Brunye et al., 2015). To further test this, we investigated north pointing at Texas A&M University, which is misaligned with cardinal directions by 45 degrees. In this environment, pointing parallel or perpendicular to the roads could bias north pointing away from north. In an experiment, 126 undergraduates completed familiarity with campus and sense-of-direction surveys. Participants walked to one of eight predetermined locations and pointed north, which was recorded using a compass application. Participants tended to point northwest, which was often parallel with nearby roads, and pointing accuracy was related to campus familiarity and sense-of-direction. These findings contribute to a further understanding of how individuals make spatial decisions across various environments

Pointing North Online: Using photographs of known environments to evaluate north pointing accuracy

Previous research has found that cognitive maps are not consistently oriented towards north as people tend to bias their north-pointing estimates towards nearby roads (Brunyé et al., 2015). While pointing studies are typically conducted within familiar environments, it is not clear whether north-pointing estimates will show a similar bias towards nearby roads when individuals are not physically located in the environment. In essence, a north-pointing task when not located within the environment is a perspective-taking task. In a series of experiments, participants rated their familiarity with the Texas A&M campus and two nearby cities, completed a self-assessment of sense-of-direction, and then pointed towards north. The pointing task used photographs of the A&M campus to provide a location and initial orientation. These experiments provide new insights into individual differences in north pointing and perspective-taking skills when an individual is not physically present within the environment

Teaching spatial thinking from interdisciplinary perspectives workshop

Short paperThe Teaching Spatial Thinking from Interdisciplinary Perspectives (TSTIP) workshop was held at COSIT 2015 in New Mexico, NM. The objective of the workshop was to bring together researchers from a diverse set of fields to address the issue of how to best promote teaching spatial thinking topics from interdisciplinary perspectives. The TSTIP workshop was one project that came out of the TSTIP Initiative, which seeks to promote teaching spatial thinking topics from interdisciplinary perspectives. This short paper introduces the TSTIP Initiative and its projects.Peer reviewe