Human Sense of Direction and Wayﬁndingweb.psych.ualberta.ca/~ecornell/SOD-Ms.pdf · Human Sense of Direction and Wayﬁnding Edward H. Cornell, Autumn Sorenson, and Teresa Mio Department

Human Sense of Direction and Wayfinding

Edward H. Cornell, Autumn Sorenson, and Teresa Mio

Department of Psychology, University of Alberta

One of the oldest beliefs about human wayfinding is that some people have a natural ability that distinguishes themfrom others. In four experiments, we asked adults to rate their own sense of direction, a promising index oforientation skills despite its simplicity and reliance on self-assessment. There were small to moderate correlationsbetween self-ratings and accuracy of pointing to imagined landmarks, accuracy of path choices during a routereversal and detour, speed at executing shortcuts, and accuracy of choices of halls within a building complex.Although we did not find consistent gender differences in actual wayfinding, effects across experiments indicatethat females rated their sense of direction as worse thanmales. Deliberations by femalesmay have affected the speedof some of their performances. The results suggest that self-evaluation of sense of direction is associated withevaluation of one’s familiarity with features of particular environments, as well as memories of successes and failuresin recent wayfinding efforts. Key Words: orientation, spatial cognition, wayfinding.

Over a century has passed since the construct of ahuman sense of direction began to be describedin scientific literature (Darwin, in Romanes

1883). As we shall see, having a sense of direction has beenassociated with an ability to discriminate fine-grainedenvironmental cues, a special sensory apparatus such as amagnetic sense, memories of locations constituting acognitive map, strategies for learning a route, a schematicrepresentation of one’s past experiences in navigation andorientation tasks, and the ability to mentally align one’scurrent heading within an imagined frame of reference.People can estimate their sense of direction as a trait, and asimple self-ratingmay reflect a cluster of orienting abilitiesthat are useful in large-scale environments. Individualdifferences in self-ratings of sense of direction may beimportant for personnel selection and training (Hegartyand Montello 1995; Heth, Cornell, and Flood 2002). Inaddition, the study of people who demonstrate goodorientation skills may reveal the cognitive processesattributed to a good sense of direction.

The purpose of the four experiments presented in thisreport is to examine the construct validity of self-ratings ofsense of direction. We begin by examining correlationsbetween different ratings of sense of direction and theability to point to familiar places from imagined vantagepoints. The test procedures replicate and extend researchestablishing the validity of self-ratings of sense of direc-tion. We then attempt to establish correlations betweenratings of sense of direction and performance on real-world wayfinding tasks. The tasks include the ability tostay on course after confronting a detour on a familiarpath, the ability to make a shortcut in a new neighbor-hood, and the ability to inferwhichhallway leads to a roomwithin a building complex that had been viewed from the

outside. Table 1 previews the different experimentalparadigms and predictions that groups with self-ratings ofa good sense of direction (GSOD) are better at orientingand wayfinding than groups with self-ratings of a poorsense of direction (PSOD). This article reports on anassessment of the predictions shown in the table.

Sense of Direction andGeographic Experience

For at least thirty years, geographers and cartographershave been actively interested in mental representationsthat people construct as a result of everyday commerce intheir environments (e.g., Downs and Stea 1973). Beha-vioral geographers consider cognitive maps to be naturalsources of information and preferences for spatial choices(Garling and Golledge 1999). The rationale for collabora-tion with cognitive psychology is that common andsometimes distorted interpretations of environments mayexplain decisions that result in patterns of migration,shopping, recreation, regionalization, and use of resources(Lloyd 1989, 1997). Similarly, cartographers have inter-ests in designingmaps and navigation aids that fit thewaysthat people conceptualize environmental features andplan activities (Egenhofer and Mark 1995). While some-times thought of as a formal and conventional enterprise,the mapping of the layout and identity of environmentalfeatures is essentially symbolic and selective, a processembedded in culture, communication, and human pur-pose (Blaut 1991; Stea and Blaut 1996).

In this context, it is important to consider howa sense of direction is fundamental to comprehension ofgeographic experience. A sense of direction may befirst provided egocentrically. Our heading is our facing

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93(2), 2003, pp. 399–425r 2003 by Association of American GeographersPublished by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, U.K.

direction, the direction that aligns our sense systems foreffective guidance of locomotion. At any place on earth,our heading is linked to particular perspectives of land-marks and configurations of landscape. A sense of direc-tion is also derived from the perception of knownlandmarks and landscape as we move to different places(Gibson 1979). The invariant relations between geog-raphic features—distributions of sites and boundaries ofregions—provide a spatial framework for positioningourselves (Golledge 1995).

Levine (1982) neatly illustrates a cartographic applica-tion: forward heading and cues for matching the structureof the visible terrain are the helpful components of you-are-here displays. In the present series of studies, ourconcern is whether people’s appraisal of their sense ofdirection is a valid index of their abilities to orient andfind their way in large-scale environments. If self-ratingspredict performance, their use may be extended toreveal the value of mapping techniques or to understandcertain patterns of spatial judgment and decisionmaking.

Ideas about Mechanisms

The scientific study of the human sense of directiontypically includes observations of the ability to indicate abearing. Of course, many sensory adaptations allowimmediate perception of the layout of the environment;thus, for example, we are not amazed when a taxi driverselects routes that approach a building that is periodicallyvisible in the skyline. The mechanisms underlying a senseof direction aremoremysteriouswhen cues for orientationare not obvious. For example, several nineteenth-century

European explorers reported that native guides could keeptheir course across homogeneous expanses of sea, fea-tureless ice fields, or cluttered and trackless woods andjungles. These feats of navigation were often attributed toan innate or instinctual sense of direction (Gatty 1958).Subsequent anthropological analyses usually indicatedthat environments that appeared to be homogeneous andfeatureless to the foreign explorer were extensivelydifferentiated by the native (e.g., Gladwin 1970). Theseanalyses lead to the appreciation that the feel of wavesunderneath a Puluwat canoe may be as informative as anarrowed sign on a London street.

The human sense of direction has also been consideredto be mediated by an unconscious sensory apparatus, areceptor that is sensitive to magnetic fields (Baker 1981;Baker, Mather, and Kennaugh 1983). However, theevidence for a sixth or magnetic sense has been difficultto interpret and replicate (Howard and Templeton 1966;Gould andAble 1981; Able andGergits 1985).Moreover,humans cannot reliably report magnetic sensations, so itis difficult to conceive how typically weak geomagneticforces might influence wayfinding decisions (Tagg 1982).

Recently, sense of direction has been studied as anability or trait that people can report that they possess tosome degree (Kozlowski and Bryant 1977). Collegestudents responded to the question ‘‘How good is yoursense of direction?’’ on seven- or nine-point bipolar scales,with 1 labeled as poor and the highest value labeled asgood. This direct approach was based on interviews thatsuggested that laypeople have an idea of what a sense ofdirection is and a ready estimate of their own abilities.Moreover, when asked about their sense of direction, someindividuals expressed pride in their orientation skills,

Table 1. Predictions that Groups with Ratings of a Good Sense of Direction (GSOD) Should Perform Better thanGroups with Ratings of a Poor Sense of Direction (PSOD)

Experiment Orienting or Wayfinding Abilities Performance Measures Predicted Results

1 Pointing to nonvisible landmarks Latency to point GSOD should be fasterAccuracy of pointing GSOD should be more accuratea

2 Reversing a route with a detour Recall of route events GSOD should recall morea

Recognition of scenes GSOD should be more accuratea

Ordering scenes along route GSOD should be more accurateDistance estimation GSOD should be more accuratePath choices GSOD should be more accuratea

Latency to point to endpoints GSOD should be fasterb

Accuracy of pointing to endpoints GSOD should be more accuratea

3 Devising a shortcut Speed of execution GSOD should be fastera

Distance traveled GSOD should travel lessb

4 Locating site within building Latency of choice of hallway GSOD should be fasterb

Accuracy of choice of hallway GSOD should be more accuratea

aObtained results were statistically reliable.bObtained results were consistent with prediction but not statistically reliable.

Cornell, Sorenson, and Mio400

whereas others disclosed incidents in which they hadbeen lost.

As a variable that differentiates individuals, self-ratingdoes not address how a person may have formed animpression of their sense of direction. However, KozlowskiandBryant (1977) suggest that sense of direction is relatedto the accuracy of cognitive maps. In this context,cognitive maps were taken as mental representations thatpreserved survey knowledge of a familiar environment.Survey knowledge includes metric and relational infor-mation about landmarks and paths; distances, bearings,and the configuration of objects may be simultaneouslyrepresented as if seen from a bird’s-eye view (Hart andMoore 1973; Siegel and White 1975; Thorndyke andGoldin 1983). Koslowski and Bryant (1977) establishedmoderate correlations (rs � 0.49 to � 0.51) betweenself-ratings of sense of direction by college students andthe magnitude of their errors when pointing to knownbuildings from an imagined vantage point on theircampus.

The implication of these correlations, however, hasbeen disputed. Passini (1984) argues that they may simplyreflect self-evaluation of environmental knowledge; thecorrelations do not assess the prediction that a personwitha good sense of direction can immediately establish his orher bearings in novel environments. Consistent with thiscriticism, Kozlowski and Bryant (1977) did not find aninitial difference between students with either good orpoor ratings when pointing to locations in an unfamiliartunnel complex. Instead, students who rated themselvesas having a good sense of direction showed improvementsin pointing accuracy over four walks through the complex,suggesting that they might have attentive or mnemonicstrategies that yield good environmental knowledge andthe ability to imagine spatial relations of landmarks.Students who rated themselves as having a poor sense ofdirection did not improve.

Subsequent research has also indicated that peoplewho rate themselves as having a good sense of directionhave good recall of indoor locations. For example, Lorenzand Neisser (1986) used factor analysis of a variety ofecological and psychometric variables to establish rela-tions to self-ratings of sense of direction. Interestingly,they found a strong correlation (r5 0.78) between theseven-point rating scale and a factor extracted from moredetailed self-reports about a variety of orientation skills.Judgments of the ability to return to a place visited once,memories of being lost in buildings and cities, confusionsbetween right and left, and the ability to remember verbaldirections to find a destination constituted the generalorientation factor. In contrast, this factor and the self-ratings of sense of direction did not show significant

correlations with mental spatial manipulation abilitiesmeasured by psychometric tests, the ability to pointaccurately to places on campus or in the world, or knowl-edge of routes. There were modest correlations betweenself-ratings and the ability to place landmarks on a floorplan of the building that housed the room in whichassessments were conducted. The names of the landmarkswere provided by the tester and were architecturalfeatures (stairs, ramps, signs) that the participants hadexperienced en route to the room. That site memorieswere superior is consistent with the interpretation thatpeople with a good sense of direction strategically encodeevents along routes. Thesememories could be the result ofpiloting, a process of directing travel by monitoring theidentity, distance, and bearing of environmental featuresas they are perceived (Gallistel 1993).

A unique study by Montello and Pick (1993) alsoindicated the importance of recent memories of thelocations of indoor landmarks (windows, signs, lockers).Eight landmarkswere pointed out as college students wereled through a large building complex containing twolevels. At the end of the tour, students were asked to pointin the direction of the landmarks; half of the landmarkswere on a different level in the complex. Students werethen asked to estimate how good their sense of directionwas relative to that of other people.Moderate correlationsindicated that studentswhowere faster andmore accuratein pointing reported a better sense of direction. However,because estimates of sense of direction were not takenprior to the pointing task, students could reflect upon theirdifficulty with the pointing task before reporting how goodtheir sense of direction was.

These interpretations are consistent with the notionthat people’s assessment of their sense of direction may besimilar to other beliefs about the self, a schematicrepresentation of a variety of incidents in autobiographicalmemory (Bem 1972; Markus 1980). People likely modifyideas about themselves as wayfinders after they cleverlycalculate a shortcut or after reflecting upon an episode ofbeing lost. Many self-concepts are biased by recentexperiences (Markus and Nurius 1986; Klein and Loftus1993), and the assessment of sense of direction may un-duly weigh those memories that are most easily retrieved.

What might produce memories of using one’s senseof direction? Sholl (1988) has suggested a cognitiveprocess—that people with a good sense of direction aregood at imagining spatial relationships beyond theirimmediate position and surround. In particular, Sholl’sdata indicated that in contrast to students with a poorsense of direction, students with a good sense of directionwere more accurate at pointing to landmarks when theyhad to assume a viewpoint that was misaligned with their

Human Sense of Direction and Wayfinding 401

forward facing. According to Sholl, sense of directionreflects the ability to mentally coordinate egocentric andimagined frames of references. This coordinationwould beimportant when updating one’s position in obscureenvironments, such as when firefighters are in smoke-filled buildings or when ambulance drivers are betweenbuildings that do not afford views of the skyline.

Relations to Wayfinding

The concept of a sense of directionwas invoked in earlyanalyses of navigation, when an organism was observed tofind its way efficiently through unfamiliar territory (Trow-bridge 1913). Studies of human and animal navigationhave since identified methods of wayfinding that rely onlandmark and route recognition, integration of feedbackfrom locomotion, and use of survey knowledge, or re-presentations of the distance and direction of objects toone another (Gallistel 1993). In general, it appears thathumans are capable of a variety of methods of wayfinding,depending on the modes of information available to themand considerations of efficiency and aesthetics (Golledge1999; Cornell and Heth 2000). An individual’s sense ofdirection could be important to all of these methods. Forexample, a person with a good sense of direction may bebetter able to look for areas likely to contain landmarksand can use that information to direct actions at inter-sections on routes. A good sense of direction can provide areliable reference bearingwhen an individual is registeringthe degree of a turn. Finally, people with a good sense ofdirection should be able to accurately orient their mentalrepresentation of a configuration of landmarks to match ascene they are presently viewing. In each of the experi-ments that follow,we suggestways inwhich a good sense ofdirection may facilitate orientation and wayfinding per-formance. We also examine what people with high self-ratings say they do.

Experiment 1

Kozlowski and Bryant (1977) proposed that a sense ofdirection was a product of ordinary cognitive abilities.They argued that a sense of direction reflects a person’sorienting and mapping competence and is not a specialmental faculty. As suggested by Tolman’s (1948) descrip-tion of cognitivemapping, sense of directionwasmeasuredas the ability to indicate the bearings of nonvisiblelocations. Kozlowski and Bryant did not describe thesequence of reckoning that might produce accuratepointing, but reported results that indicated that surveyknowledge, knowledge of routes, and attentional andmemorial abilities were likely involved. In this first

experiment, we also asked university students to ratetheir sense of direction and to indicate the bearings ofsites on campus while imagining they were at centralvantage points.

Estimation processes are involved both in inferring thelocation of nonvisible locations and in assessing one’s ownsense of direction. Self-ratings could include estimatinghow difficult one typically finds it to remember knownroutes and landmarks. Assessing the prowess of one’s ownsense of direction could also involve memories of thechallenges, effort, confusion, anxiety, and satisfactionexperienced during episodes of successful and unsuccess-ful wayfinding. Kozlowski and Bryant (1977) acceptedthat college undergraduates have a ready estimate of theirown sense of direction, but did not ask them what theyconsidered in making their estimate. Prefatory to thepresent experiment, we asked students and people in ourcity to list the abilities they associated with having a goodsense of direction. These intuitions suggested a variety oftasks to establish the construct validity of self-ratingsof sense of direction.

This experiment allows tests of individual differencevariables that may be associated with self-ratings of senseof direction. We begin by assessing three single-itemscales. Each of these scales is reported to havemoderate tostrong correlations with performance in pointing tasks(Kozlowski and Bryant 1977; Bryant 1982; Sholl 1988;Montello and Pick 1993). Although there may beuneasiness about using only a few measures to assess anyindividual difference variable, Kozlowski and Bryant(1977) pointed out that test-retest coefficients of theirself-ratings of sense of direction were impressive whenassessed over two weeks to three months. Moreover,subsequent research has shown that multivariate mea-sures of orientation skills are highly correlated with thesimple self-ratings, and there appears to be a single factorunderlying more extensive questionnaires (Lorenz andNeisser 1986; Sholl 1988; Bryant 1991; Svennson 1994;Hegarty and Montello 1995).

Currently, a great deal of controversy surrounds theexistence and importance of gender-related individualdifferences in real-world spatial cognition (Self et al. 1992;Self and Golledge 2000). Pertinent to the present study,there are some indications that females in Westernsocieties are less confident of their general orientationabilities than are males, and that males are generally moreaccurate at pointing to environmental landmarks (Koz-lowski and Bryant 1977; Bryant 1982; Holding andHolding 1989; Sadalla and Montello 1989; Montello andPick 1993; Lawton 1994; Devlin and Bernstein 1995;Lawton,Charleston, andZieles 1996; Sholl et al. 2000; seereviews by Harris 1981; Kitchin 1996; Montello et al.


1999).We sampled an equal number ofmenandwomen toallow further tests of gender differences in self-ratings ofsense of direction and pointing abilities.

In contrast to people with poor self-ratings, people withgood self-ratings may use different information or strate-gies for remaining oriented and estimating bearings. Toexplore this possibility, we asked participants to thinkaloud as they estimated the direction of nonvisiblelandmarks. Verbal protocols could indicate methods thatare associatedwith successful performance (Lawton 1994;Lawton, Charleston, and Zieles 1996; Ericsson and Simon1996), which, in turn, could lead participants to believethat they have a good sense of direction.

The experiment also allows tests of environmentalvariables that may influence how quickly and accuratelyparticipants point to nonvisible landmarks. Some researchhas indicated small correlations between measures ofprevious experience in test environments and the accu-racy of estimating bearings (Kozlowski and Bryant 1977;Bryant 1982; Prestopnik and Roskos-Ewoldsen 2000).However, it is not clear whether the effects occur becauseprevious experience includes a variety of visual perspec-tives of theoutdoor skyline or because previous experienceincludes the perception of landmarks next to paths andtheir associated actions, such as turning or continuing.Here, we asked participants to rate their familiarity withshort and tall target landmarks. We selected a variety oflandmarks: some short buildings that receive heavy usage,such as the rapid transit station; some short landmarksthat are less often visited, such as the track; some tallbuildings that receive heavy usage, such as the studentunion building; and some tall buildings that are less oftenvisited, such as a faculty office complex.However, becausetall buildings can be seen from many vantage points oncampus, wewould expect that the location of tall buildingswould be imagined more quickly and accurately than thelocation of short buildings. Asking participants to imaginethat they are at different vantage points before they pointalso assesses the role of visual perspectives. One vantagepoint is an open site on campus that affords a panorama;the other is in a narrow corridor between buildings. Ifskyline perspectives are important for orienting, we wouldexpect that the imagined open vantage point should allowmore rapid and accurate pointing than the imaginedclosed vantage point.

Method

Participants. Undergraduates at our university parti-cipated to fulfill an introductory psychology courserequirement. There were thirty-two males and thirty-two females (median age 19.9; range 18.1–26.1).

Apparatus. The device to record the compass bearingof points resembled a telescope. A hollow tube wasmounted on a tripod fixed to the center of the floor. Thetube could be freely rotated in the horizontal plane. Aneedle attached beneath the tube pointed along a ringwith 360 equally spaced markings. The zero mark of thering was oriented to the northwest, and themarkings werenot visible when the participant was sighting through thetube. A digital stopwatch was used to record latency ofresponses.

Vantage Points and Landmarks. Each participant wasasked successively to imagine that he or she was standingat different sites on campus and facing north. The re-searcher asked the participants what they might see infront of them to check that they were imagining theappropriate vantage points.One of the vantage points wasopen, situated at the center of an open quad that affordedviews of lines of trees and tall buildings on the skyline.Another vantage point was closed, positioned in a narrowcorridor between buildings that allowed only a view ofexterior walls and a narrow band of sky. After amoment toallow participants to imagine the situation, the researcherasked them to point the sighting tube in the direction ofbuildings, as they would be located from that vantagepoint. The target landmarks were the same for bothvantage points; four of the buildings were two stories orless, and four were nine stories or more.

Procedure. Participants were tested individually in asmall windowless room. The room was embedded in anobscure wing of a large building complex. The sightingtube was in the middle of the room, and a desk and chairfor the researcher sat along one wall. After participantswere greeted, they were told that the research concernedpeople’s ideas about their sense of direction and that therewere two procedures, a questionnaire and a pointing task.Half of the participants were given the questionnaire atthe outset; the others received the pointing task first. Theorder of the two procedures was counterbalanced to assesswhether participants biased their appraisal of their senseof direction in light of their perceived familiarity withtarget landmarks. However, because participants werenotprovidedwith feedbackabout theaccuracyof theirpoint-ing, they could not adjust their estimates of their senseof direction to match their actual performance (cf. Heth,Cornell, and Flood 2002).

Questionnaire. The questionnaire was divided intothree sections. Participants were asked to rate their senseof direction, to rate their familiarity with landmarkbuildings, and to rank order a list of qualities that theythought characterized a good sense of direction.


Three self-ratings were used. The first was based onKozloski and Bryant (1977), who showed a correlation of0.93 between responses on seven- or nine-point ratingscales. The self-rating used here consisted of the question‘‘How good is your sense of direction?’’ atop a nine-pointscale anchored by ‘‘Poor’’ near the 1 and ‘‘Good’’ near the9. We refer to this as theHow good? scale. The second selfratingwas based onMontello andPick (1993) and allowedparticipants to record their own numbers: ‘‘In a roomwith100 people, estimate the number of people who have abetter sense of direction than you do: ____.’’ We refer tothis as the Number better? scale. The third self-ratinglinked sense of direction to wayfinding abilities, aconnection established by Bryant (1991). As in the firstself-rating, the question was ‘‘How good is your sense ofdirection?’’ but the anchors for the scale below thequestion were ‘‘Easily find my way’’ near the 1 and ‘‘Easilylost’’ near the 9. Note that good ratings are at differentends of the first and third scales. We refer to this as theEasily lost? scale.

In the second section of the questionnaire, participantsindicated their familiarity with each of the landmarks thatserved as a pointing target. For example, the first item onthe list consisted of the question ‘‘What is your estimationof your familiarity with the main entrance of Lister Hall?’’atop a nine-point scale anchored by ‘‘Familiar’’ near the 1and ‘‘Not familiar’’ near the 9.

In the third section of the questionnaire, participantswere asked to read a list of abilities ‘‘that are associatedwith having a good sense of direction’’ (see Table 2). Thelist included the eleven abilitiesmost frequently suggestedwhen a pilot sample of sixty-four undergraduates andtwenty-four adults approached at a shopping mall wereasked to create associations. Participantswere encouragedto write in any other ability they thought to be related andto rank order the descriptions ‘‘as to how important theyare to having a good sense of direction, with 1 being anextremely important component and11or 12beinghardlyrelated to sense of direction.’’

Pointing Task. The researcher demonstrated how thesighting tube could be rotated in either direction.Participants were told to imagine that the tube was atelescope that allowed them to see through walls,buildings, and landscaping to the center of designatedtargets. Participants were told that they would be asked topoint the tube as if viewing distant buildings, and that theaccuracy and speed of each point would be recorded.Demonstrating a point to the steps of city hall, theresearcher started the stopwatch, slowly rotated the tubein a large arc, made minor back-and-forth corrections,announced ‘‘There,’’ stopped the watch, and read themark indicating the azimuth of the response. After each

point, the tube was oriented to the northwest corner ofthe room.

Participants were then invited to practice as if theywere at a different vantage point: ‘‘Imagine that you arestanding at the entrance to city hall and this tube is facingdue north. What would you see in front of you?—Thereflecting pool. When I tell you the name of a targetbuilding, I will start the stopwatch.When you are satisfiedthat you have made your most accurate point, removeyour hand from the tube and that will be my signal to stopthe watch. Now, facing north at the entrance of city hall,point through buildings, cars, and trees as if you could lookat the front door of where you live.’’

Experimental procedures and gender of participantswere counterbalanced. After the practice, half of theparticipants began by pointing to the landmark buildingsfrom the open vantage point and half began from theclosed vantage point. Each participant was presentedlandmark targets in accord with two of four prearrangedrandom sequences of the short and tall buildings. Half ofthe participants were told to talk aloud as they made theirpointing response. They were told to feel free to verbalizewhatever crossed their minds as they estimated thebearing to the target. The others were asked to describetheir methods of estimation retrospectively after eachpoint. Delayed reports of methods are typically not asinformative as talk during task execution; however, therequirement to talk during task execution may sometimesaffect task performance (Russo, Johnson, and Stephens1989; Ericsson and Simon 1996). The random assignmentof participants to these two procedures allows an assess-ment of differential effects.

Accuracy of pointing was measured as the absoluteerror of pointing, defined as the angular distance between

Table 2. Mean Rank Order of the Importance of AbilitiesAssociated with a Good Sense of Direction

The Ability to Mean Rank

Take shortcuts 8.5Not get lost 7.6Imagine landmarks on the skyline 7.3Gain one’s bearing in a building 6.8Retrace exactly a recently traveled route 6.6Find your destination after inadvertentlystepping off a familiar route 5.9

Gain one’s bearing upon exiting a building 5.6Read and follow maps 5.2Know where a variety of landmarks are 4.8Be able to give or follow directions 4.7(Participants’ suggestions)a 4.6Know where north, south, east, and west are 4.3a Ten participants suggested abilities that were not provided on the

questionnaire. N5 64 for all other mean ranks.


the bearing of the point and the bearing of the target(Batschelet 1981). Using SPSSt (2002), absolute error iscomputed as

MIN½ABSðf�CÞ;3601� ABSðf�CÞ�whereC is the compass bearing of the participant’s pointto the target and f is the true bearing to the target. Notethat absolute error does not preserve the radial directionofpointing responses: deviation around a target on a circlebecomes a scalar variable limited to values between 01and 1801.

Results

Abilities Associated with Sense of Direction. Table 2lists the mean rank importance of the navigation andorienting abilities that participants associated with a goodsense of direction. Separate listings for females and malesand groups who ranked abilities before or after the point-ing task indicated that the five abilities that appear at thetop of Table 1 were included in the top five of all four lists.

Self-Ratings of Sense of Direction. A three-factoranalysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to explore theeffects of gender, order (questionnaire first versus pointingtask first), and report (think aloud versus retrospective)on each of the three self-ratings of sense of direction.There were no statistically significant main effects orinteractions involving any of the three self-ratings. Themajority of university students had high appraisals of theirsense of direction. In response to the How good? scale,mean self-ratings for females were 6.0 (standard deviation[SD]5 1.9) and mean self-ratings for males were 6.6(SD5 1.4). The first two columns of Table 3 indicatereliable and moderately high correlations between thethree self-ratings.

Latency to Point. Individual Differences Variables. Atwo-factor ANOVA was used to explore the effects of

gender and report (think aloud versus retrospective) onthe latency to point to imaginary targets. Not surprisingly,there was a reliable main effect of report (F(1, 64)516.90, mean square error [MSE]5 183.60, p o .001).Participants asked to talk aloud while they estimated theirpoint had amean latency of 27.4 sec,while thosewhowereasked retrospectively how they estimated spent lesstime pointing—mean latency5 16.0 sec. There was alsoa reliable interaction of report with gender (F(1, 64)5 10.49, po.01). Females who were asked to talk aloudwhile pointing spent the longest time making theirestimations—mean latency5 35.0 sec. Females andmales who reported their methods retrospectively andmales who talked aloud during their pointing had meanlatencies of 14.2, 17.8, and 20.3 sec, respectively.

Bivariate correlations between mean latency to pointand the three self-ratings of sense of direction did notreliably differ from zero, regardless of whether calculatedfrom the whole sample (as presented in the third columnof Table 3) or calculated for the groups assigned differentorders or different methods of report.

Environmental variables. A 2� 2 repeated-measuresANOVA was conducted to examine the effects of theheight of the imagined buildings (low versus high) andimagined vantage point (open versus closed) on latencyto point. There was a reliable effect of height(F(1, 64)5 3.96, MSE5 20.21, p5 .05). The meanlatency to point to low buildings was 22.1 sec and themean latency to point to high buildings was 21.0 sec. Noother effects were reliable.

Accuracy of Pointing. Individual Difference Variables. Atwo-factor ANOVA was used to explore the effects ofgender and report (think aloud versus retrospective) onthe mean absolute error of pointing. There was asignificant main effect of gender (F(1, 64)5 6.18,MSE5 567.494, p o .02). The mean absolute error forfemales was 471 and themean absolute error formales was331. No other effects were reliable.

Table 3. Bivariate Correlations (r) of Self-Ratings of Sense of Direction, Measures of Pointing to Imagined Targets,and Self-Ratings of Familiarity with Target Landmarks

Number Better? Easily Lost?Mean PointingLatency (sec)

Mean AbsoluteError (1)

Mean LandmarkFamiliarity

How good? � 0.75** � 0.74** 0.03 � 0.26* � 0.29*

Number better? 0.65** 0.01 0.18 0.15Easily lost? � 0.03 0.18 0.32**

Mean pointing latency (sec) 0.14 � 0.25*

Mean absolute error (1) 0.25*

* po .05 and ** po .01, with N5 64 and two-tailed significance.


The rating of ‘‘How good is your sense of direction?’’was negatively correlated with pointing error, and theother self-rating measures showed consistent but weakercorrelations (see column four of Table 3). The pattern ofresults appeared to be the same when correlations werecalculated for the group that was asked to rate their senseof direction prior to the pointing task; only theHow good?rating was reliably correlated with pointing error (N5 32;r5 �.43, po.01, two-tailed). There were no reliablecorrelations between ratings of sense of direction andpointing error in the group that rated their sense ofdirection after the pointing task, or when the talk-aloudand retrospective-report groups were analyzed separately,although the pattern of correlations was similar to thatappearing in Table 3 for the full sample.

Environmental Variables. A 2� 2 repeated-measuresANOVA was conducted to examine the effects of theheight of the imagined buildings (low versus high) andimagined vantage point (open versus closed) on themeanabsolute error of pointing. There was a reliable effect ofvantage point (F(1, 64)5 6.32,MSE5 770.33, po .05).The mean pointing error from the imagined open vantagepoint was 361, and the pointing error from the imaginedclosed vantage point was 441. No other effects werereliable.

Familiarity with Landmarks. A 2� 2 mixed-designANOVA was used to examine ratings of familiarity withthe imagined landmarks. Factors included the individualdifferences variable of gender and the environmentalvariable of building height. There was only a reliable effectof height (F(1, 64)5 6.90, MSE5 1.11, p o .05). Themean rating of the familiarity of low buildings was 3.8,

whereas high buildings were rated as more familiar—M5 3.3.

The last column of Table 3 indicates that ratings offamiliarity with the landmarks were reliably correlatedwith two measures of sense of direction, as well as thelatency and accuracy of pointing. The extent to whichenvironmental familiarity mediates the correlation be-tween self-ratings of sense of direction and the meanabsolute error of pointing can be estimated by a partialcorrelation coefficient. Controlling for the mean rating offamiliarity with target landmarks, the ‘‘How good?’’ ratingwas still negatively correlated with pointing errors, but themagnitude was reduced to the extent that the correlationwas not statistically reliable (N5 64, pr5 � 0.20,po.10, two-tailed).

Reports of Methods of Estimation. Participants weredivided into two independent groups based on self-ratingsless than and greater than 5 in response to theHow good?scale. This grouping allowed us to examine whetherGSOD participants (25 females and 28 males) reporteddifferentmethods of estimating points to target landmarksthan PSOD participants (6 females and 4 males; only onestudent selected the middle rating). The verbalizationsduring pointing and retrospective accounts of methods toestimate points could be represented in five categories, asillustrated in Table 4. Two research assistants indepen-dently coded all responses; agreement was indicated by aCohen’s kappa coefficient of 0.83. Disagreements wereresolved by discussion.A preliminary tabulation indicatedno reliable differences in category assignments when thegroup instructed to talk aloud was compared to the groupinstructed to provide retrospective explanations; the

Table 4. Frequency of Explanations for Estimating Points to Landmarks by Participants with Self-Ratings Indicatinga Good Sense of Direction (GSOD) or Poor Sense of Direction (PSOD)

GSOD PSOD

Categories: Examples of Explanations Frequency

Percent ofParticipants(of 53) Frequency

Percent ofParticipants(of 10)

Survey knowledge, local framework: ‘‘The Rec Center is right acrossfrom the Student Union, by Lister Hall.’’ 52 98 9 90

Survey knowledge, global framework: ‘‘I think the Tory Building is inthe northeast direction.’’ 47 89 10 100

Egocentric view: ‘‘I’m imagining myself looking at V-wing and I knowthat it’s behind me and maybe looking to the left.’’ 45 85 9 90

Route knowledge: ‘‘And I know when I got out of Biological Sciencesand walk down the path past Earth Sciences, it will lead me to theTory Building.’’ 29 53 6 60

Guess: ‘‘I can’t figure out where Biological Sciences is fromhere, thereare so many buildings around, so I’m just going to guess.’’ 7 13 0 0


groups were combined to provide the listings in Table 4.Forty-four of the 53 GSOD participants (83 percent)and all 10 PSOD participants described more thantwo methods across their sixteen points. Repetitions ofan explanation by a participant did not add more to asingular count of their use of thatmethod, but descriptionsof othermethods by the same participant added a count tothose respective categories. Table 4 indicates the fre-quency of particular methods reported, as well as thepercentage of participants who reported a method at leastonce.

Table 4 indicates that only a small proportion ofparticipants guessed the bearing of target landmarks.Group differences were not reliable; participants with highand low ratings both reported use of survey knowledge andscene-based egocentric frames of reference with similarhigh frequencies and reporteduse of route knowledgewithsimilar moderate frequencies. Separate listings for femalesand males and groups who ranked abilities before or afterthe pointing task did not indicate reliable differences incategories of explanations.

Discussion

People who were asked to rate their own sense ofdirection associated it with practical abilities. Table 2indicates that university students believe that a goodsense of direction is useful for wayfinding and orientationusing natural environmental cues. Knowledge of conven-tional representations—such as maps, verbal directions,and cardinal directions—was not rated as important to agood sense of direction as were abilities associated withtaking shortcuts, retracing routes, and navigating inunfamiliar territory. A good sense of direction wasconsidered to be important in situations in whichenvironmental information is limited, such as when thelocation of landmarks must be imagined or when in abuilding. In sum, the ratings suggest real-world tasks thatcan be used to assess the validity of self-ratings of sense ofdirection.

When asked to point to buildings from imaginedvantage points on campus, students with high and lowratings did not differ in the frequency of reports of themethods they used. Moreover, students with high ratingsdid not report a wider selection of the methods forestimating bearings. Table 4 shows that explanations byboth groups predominantly included survey knowledgeand views that would be seen from the assumed vantagepoint. Buildings were located in relation to the position ofother local landmarks and in relation to large-scale framesof reference, such as cardinal directions. Route knowledgewas less frequently reported, although more than half the

students inferred building locations by reconstructing thesequence of events they would experience as they walkedon campus paths. In sum, almost every participant used avariety of modes of representation to address the require-ments of pointing to imagined targets.

When asked, ‘‘How good is your sense of direction?’’university students judged their senses of direction to bemoderately good. A relatively small number of studentsrated their sense of direction as poor (cf. Sholl et al. 2000),suggesting that a broader group of participants should beselected for a more balanced assessment of individualdifferences in wayfinding performance. Mean self-ratingsby males were a half-scale value greater than those offemales, but the difference was not statistically significant.This result is consistent with recent reviews;males tend toexpress more confidence in their spatial and geographicabilities than females, but the difference may not bereliable in particular samples, and no studies find thatfemales express more confidence than males (Kitchin1996; Lawton, Charleston, and Zieles 1996; Montelloet al. 1999).

In contrast, differences between males and femaleswere reliable in our analyses of pointing performance.When participants were asked to talk aloud while makingtheir estimates of target locations, females tookmore timethan males. The longer deliberations by females could bethe result of lack of confidence or of attempts to justifythoroughly their methods of estimation. Females alsoshowed larger errors in their estimates than thosemade bymales. These gender differences in estimating targetlocations are also consistent with reviewed findings. Thepattern of results gives confidence that the rating scalesand measures of pointing performance used in the presentresearch are sensitive to known individual differencevariables.

Importantly, we replicated the negative correlationbetween self-ratings of sense of direction and meanabsolute error of pointing (cf. Kozlowski and Bryant1977). The fourth column of Table 3 indicates thathigher ratings in response to theHowgood? scalewere associ-ated with smaller errors. The two other self-ratingscales showed appropriate positive correlations withpointing accuracy, but the correlations were small andunreliable.

None of the self-ratings predicted the latency to pointto targets. Sholl (1988) found that latency differencesbetween good and poor sense-of-direction groups weremore likely to occur when targets were cities than whenthey were more familiar campus landmarks. Similarly, thefifth column of Table 3 indicates that mean pointinglatency is negatively correlated with mean ratings offamiliarity, indicating that participants who judged that


theywere not familiar with campus landmarks were slowerto estimate where they were.

In general, several results suggest that familiaritywith target landmarks should be taken into accountwhen interpreting ratings of sense of direction, as well aswhen interpreting measures of pointing to those land-marks. In addition to the correlations that appear in thefifth column of Table 3, we found that ratings of familiaritywere part of the correlation between self-ratings andpointing accuracy. This result can be interpreted in light ofthe explanations of methods of estimating target locations(Table 4). The estimator first needs to be familiar withthe environment to imagine the layout of landmarks. Theestimator can then integrate his or her own presentbearing within the imagined scene, route sequence, orsurvey representation. Passini (1984) has emphasizedthat self-ratings of sense of direction may reflect self-evaluation of environmental knowledge, whereas Sholl(1988) has emphasized that self-ratings of sense ofdirection may reflect the ability to integrate egocentricand imagined frames of reference. Our results arecompatible with the interpretation that both are compo-nents of self-evaluation of orienting abilities.

Recent theories of wayfinding have emphasized thatscenes are basic units of environmental knowledge(Kuipers and Levitt 1988; Gopal, Klatzky, and Smith1989; Chown, Kaplan, and Kortenkamp 1995; Cornell,Heth, and Skoczylas 1999). Table 4 further indicatesthat imagined scenes are used to estimate bearings.Most participants reported that they could infer thewhereabouts of a target building by reconstructing whatthey would see from the imagined vantage point. Aspredicted, the accuracy of pointing to the target buildingwas higher when the vantage point was imagined tobe the center of an open area than when it was imaginedto be in a restrictive corridor. Participants were slightlyfaster at estimating the location of high buildings than atestimating the location of low buildings. However, ifhigh buildings were more prominent in imagined scenes,some would have been more rapidly localized fromthe open vantage point than from the closed one. Theadvantage for high buildings may be that they are moreoften seen during everyday travel and are more familiarthan low buildings. The familiarity may help withretrieving the identity of the building but not its locationfrom particular vantage points (Gale et al. 1990). As wehave encountered elsewhere in this discussion, differencesin participants’ familiarity with environmental featuresmakes interpretations of orienting abilities complex. Inthe three experiments that follow, self-ratings of sense ofdirection are assessed before participants are introducedto unfamiliar territory.

Experiment 2

People may judge that they have a good sense ofdirection if they often update their bearings during travel.There are usually many opportunities for such pilotingwhen walking outdoors. Open areas along a route mayprovide opportunities to note the perspective of a talllandmark from different vantage points. Wayfinders mayalso monitor the angle of their line of travel relative to aline of objects along the skyline, such as trees that bordera river valley. Then, when off a familiar route, wayfinderscan make geometric inferences to help select paths thatare consistent with goals such as returning to the familiarroute or approaching their destination. In this secondexperiment, we asked participants to rate their senses ofdirection and we assessed their route and survey knowl-edge when their travel included a detour.

Wayfinders may also monitor their own actions, thedistance and duration of their locomotion, and thedirection and degree of their turning. A record of actionduring travel may be used for dead reckoning, a method ofupdating one’s position relative to a reference point suchas the origin of a walk or the place where a detour began(Gallistel 1993). Processes of dead reckoning may beespecially important for reconstructing routes whendistant cues for bearing are unavailable, such as incorridors between buildings or dense foliage. We assumedthat continuous updating of position, or moment-to-moment path integration, is not necessary for people todeduce where they are in relation to a reference point(Loomis et al. 1999). People may remember that anearly segment of their movement was brief and straight,that this was followed by a gradual turn to the right,and that the last portion of their movement was straightbut of longer duration than the first. Translation androtation are thus encoded as episodes, and noticeablechanges in movement provide junctions for the travelerperiodically to update his or her position or imagine aconfigural representation of the path (Cornell and Heth,2003). We predicted that people who judge themselvesas having a good sense of direction are more accurateabout distance and turns along a route than people whodo not.

Method

Subjects. Adults were recruited using an ad in acommunity newspaper. When they called in, volunteerswere asked to rate their senses of direction on the seven-point scale validated by Kozlowski and Bryant (1977) as aversion of their nine-point scale. The question was thesame: ‘‘How good is your sense of direction?’’ atop a scale


anchored by ‘‘Poor’’ near the 1 and ‘‘Good’’ near the 7.Volunteers were not included in this study if they ratedtheir sense of direction as 4 (neither good nor poor) or ifthey had previously visited our university campus. Weselected equal numbers of males and females to constitutethe GSOD and PSOD groups. This allowed us to examinewhether there were gender differences in wayfindingperformance when male and female students had similarappraisals of their sense of direction. We tested 48 adults(median age 24.0; range 18.0–47.2).

Route. The initial route followed sidewalks, paths, andservice roads and was an irregular diagonal 1,040 m inlength across the northern portion of the campus (seeFigure 1). It took approximately 11 min to walk. A 320-mdetour was introduced during the route reversal. Thisdetour went around a building complex and returned tothe initial route.

Nine intersections of two or more continuing walkwayswere designated as choice points during the return. Mostwere crossroads or Y- orT-intersections. Thesewere placeswhere participants were asked to indicate the way toproceed. Five of the choice points required a change ofbearing of travel or a shift from one path to another. Threeof the choice points occurred during the detour and wereoff the initial route; six choice points were on the route.

Four sites along the return route were designated asvantage points, places where participants were asked topoint to the start and destination of the route. Two open

vantage points afforded views of the skyline and the towerof the building housing the start of the initial route. Twoclosed vantage points were located next to buildings andlandscaping that occluded distant views. There was anopen and a closed vantage point off route and an open anda closed vantage point on route.

Procedure. Participants arrived at the campus buildingfeaturing the tower. They were shown the seven-pointrating scale for sense of direction and were given theopportunity to update their estimates. The participantswere then told that they were going on a tour of thecampus and that they would be asked some questionsabout how they find their way in new territory. They wereescorted through the building to the top landing of a set ofoutdoor stairs. The researcher asked each participant toput one foot on the first stair and announced, ‘‘These arethe stairs that mark the start of our walk across campus. Itis important that you remember this location.’’ Theresearcher then led participants to the southeast terminusof the route. During the walk, participants were told thatthe paths they were following would later be referred to asthe ‘‘initial route.’’ At the end of the route, participantswere asked to put one hand on a post that blocked vehicleaccess and were told, ‘‘This post marks the end of our tour.I will be referring to it as the destination of the initial route,and it is important that you remember it.’’

Each participant was then asked to describe in detailhow they would get from the destination of the route (thepost) back to the start of the route (the stairs). They wereinstructed to describe landmarks and actions in the orderthat they would occur during such a route reversal. Theanticipatory recall was recorded on audiotape. Next,participants were handed a shuffled set of twelve 10-by-15-cm photographs. They were told that six of thephotographs were of scenes that they would encounterduring the route reversal and six were photographs ofcampus sites they could not have seen during the initialroute. Theywere asked to select the subset of six that wereon the route they had traveled and to order the scenes inthe sequence they expected to encounter during the routereversal.

The researcher then informed participants that theywould be periodically asked to point to distant landmarksduring the return. As a rehearsal for the measurementprocess, the researcher asked participants to point to thefront doors of the transit station, which were visible fromthe post. The researcher produced an electronic stop-watch and instructed participants to be as accurate aspossible after the command to begin. The researcher said,‘‘Point to the entrance to the transit station. Begin.’’ Theresearcher started the watch. When each participant’s

Figure 1. A survey map of the northern portion of the campus. An Sindicates the start of the initial route (long dashes) and aD indicatesthe destination. Intersections used as choice points during the returnare enumerated from the destination to the start. The detour (shortdashes) begins at choice point 1 and ends at choice point 4. An Oindicates each of the two open vantage points and aC indicates eachof the two closed vantage points.


arm was stable, they were instructed to announce‘‘There.’’ and the researcher stopped the watch. Theresearcher then aligned a sighting compass along the lineof each participant’s arm while standing close behind.Participants were thanked for holding their arm stable andinstructed that they now would be asked to point to alocation that was out of sight. The researcher said, ‘‘Pointto the front door of your house. Begin.’’ and when theparticipant announced ‘‘There,’’ the measurements wererepeated.

The researcher then led the walk back to the stairs.Distance estimations were made at all nine choice points.To illustrate, at the center of the first choice point, theresearcher stopped and showed participants the backof a 30-cm ruler. The bottom of the back was marked‘‘Destination: Post’’ and the top was marked ‘‘Start:Stairs.’’ Between these were the labels ‘‘1/4 way; 1/2 way;3/4way.’’ Participants were shownhow to slide a paper clipalong the length of the ruler, and the clip was returned tothe bottom. Participants were then told to assume that thelength of the ruler represented the length of the distancebetween the post and the stairs and asked to slide the clipto that point that represented ‘‘how far they were alongthat distance.’’ The researcher then retrieved the rulerand turned it over to record the cm from the destinationlabel as indicated by the clip.

Participants were then asked to ‘‘Point to the paththat would allow you to continue to return on the initialroute.’’ If correct, the researcher said, ‘‘Good, butwe’re going to assume there is construction at thisintersection and we need to take a detour.’’ If incorrect,the researcher said, ‘‘Good, but that was not the pathwe originally walked on. It’s this one (pointing), butwe’re going to assume there is construction at thisintersection andweneed to take a detour.’’ The researcherthen led the walk to the second choice point, whichwas off route. At the second, third, and fourth choicepoints, participants were asked to ‘‘Point to the way that isthe least distance back to the initial route.’’ A backwardspoint was correct at the second choice point, a leftwardpoint was correct at the third choice point, and a forwardpoint was correct at the fourth choice point. Participantswere corrected after pointing. For example, at thesecond choice point, if incorrect, participants would betold, ‘‘Actually, the shortest way back to the initialroute is that way [pointing], which would be theway you would go to retrace your steps to the origin ofthe detour.’’ At choice points six through nine, partici-pants were again asked to ‘‘Point to the path that wouldallow you to continue on the initial route.’’ Participantswere corrected if necessary and led back on the initialroute.

Participants were also stopped at the four vantagepoints. At these sites, they were told to prepare to point tolocations that were out of sight and to be sure to announce‘‘There.’’ when they judged that their point was correct.The researcher said, ‘‘Point to the stairs at the start of thewalk. Begin.’’ recorded the latency and compass bearing,and then repeated the procedure to record pointing to thepost at the destination of the walk.

After reaching the destination, participants wereshown a survey map of the campus that included theroute they had walked and the nine choice points. Theywere asked, for each choice point, whether they hadestimated distance along the walk ‘‘as the crow flies to oneend of the route’’ or in terms of ‘‘the total length of theactual path segments to one end of the route.’’

Results

Self-Ratings of Sense of Direction. Although equalnumbers of females and males were assigned to groupswith high and low self-ratings, we examined whether themean response to theHow good? scale was different acrossgender. It was not: the mean ratings for females and maleswere 4.1 and 4.1, SDs5 1.7 and 1.6, respectively,t (46)5 .09.

Anticipatory Recall. Audiotapes of participants an-ticipating events along the return trip were transcribed,and two research assistants independently scored eachtranscription. The researchers counted the number oflandmarks named, the number of actions linked to anegocentric direction (e.g., ‘‘we’ll go left’’), the number oftimes a cardinal reference such as ‘‘to the south’’ occurred,and the number of landmarks that the participantexplicitly linked with an allocentric heading or turn(e.g., ‘‘head straight down a paved road, then turn towardthe power plant’’). Differences in counts were resolved bydiscussion.

Table 5 indicates that self-ratings of sense of directionwere moderately associated with the number of actionslinked to an egocentric direction and with the number oflandmarks explicitly linked with a heading or turn. Theother twomeasures of anticipatory recall were not reliablycorrelated with ratings of sense of direction. To examineindividual differences, the number of actions linked to anegocentric direction was the dependent measure for a2� 2 (gender� sense-of-direction group) ANOVA.Only the main effect of sense-of-direction group wasreliable, F (1, 47)5 8.27, MSE5 4.23, po.01. GSODparticipants recalled a mean of 10.7 directed actions, andPSOD participants recalled a mean of 7.8. Next, thenumber of landmarks linked to an allocentric heading was


the dependent measure for a 2� 2 (gender� sense-of-direction group) ANOVA. Only the main effect ofsense-of-direction group was reliable (F(1, 47)5 5.54,MSE5 18.42, p o .05). GSOD participants recalled amean of 4.0 landmarks associated with a heading or turn,and PSOD participants recalled a mean of 2.3.

Scene Recognition. There were two measures asso-ciated with scene recognition: the number of photoscorrectly identified as scenes that would appear during theroute reversal, and the accuracy of the anticipated order ofthose scenes. For each participant, accuracy of order wasindexed by the rank order correlation (rs) between his orher ordering and the actual order in which the sceneswould be viewed during the route reversal. Foils that wereincorrectly identified as scenes along the original routewere eliminated from subjective orderings. Three PSODparticipants did not correctly recognize more than twoscenes and were excluded from analyses of the ordering ofscenes.

Table 5 indicates that sense of directionwasmoderatelyassociated with the number of photos correctly identified.To examine individual differences, the number of photoscorrectly identified as scenes was the dependent measurefor a 2� 2 (gender� sense-of-direction group) ANOVA.Only the main effect of sense-of-direction group wasreliable (F(1, 47)5 3.79,MSE5 0.665, po .05). GSODparticipants correctly recognized a mean of 4.1 photos,andPSODparticipants correctly recognized ameanof 3.6.The correlation between ratings of sense of direction andthe rank order correlation was not reliable. Rank ordercorrelations (rs) were 0.33 and 0.37, respectively, for theGSOD and PSOD groups.

Distance Estimation. Sixteen of the forty-eight parti-cipants estimated distance traveled at each of the ninechoice points by using a crow’s-flight representation.Eighteen of the participants estimated distance traveled at

each of the nine choice points by using a representation ofthe length of the path segments. Fourteen participantsused either of these two representations at different choicepoints. Use of these different representations was notassociated with grouping of participants as to gender orgood or poor sense of direction, or with location of choicepoints on or off the original route.

Two means of the accuracy of estimates of distancetraveledwere calculated for each participant. The first wasmean accuracy at the six choice points on path; the secondwas mean accuracy at the three choice points off path.Accuracy at any one choice pointwas the absolute value ofthe difference between the participant’s estimate andeither the crow’s-flight distance or the total path-segmentdistance to the destination, in accord with the representa-tion that the participant reported using at that choicepoint.

Table 5 indicates no reliable correlation betweenratings of sense of direction and accuracy of estimates ofdistance traveled. A 2� 2� 2 ANOVA was conductedwith gender and sense-of-direction group as between-subjects variables and all tests at choice points on and offthe original route as a within-subjects variable; thedependent measure was the absolute accuracy of distanceestimations. There were no significant effects. TheGSODgroup erred on the ruler an average absolute value of3.2 cm (111m scaled to the 1,040-m route); the compar-able error for the PSOD group was 2.9 cm (101m).

Path Choices. Table 5 indicates small and statisticallyunreliable correlations between ratings of sense ofdirection and the mean number of correct path choicesat intersections on and off route. A 2� 2� 2 ANOVAwas conducted with gender and sense-of-direction groupas between-subjects variables and tests at choice points onand off the original route as a within-subjects variable; thedependent measure was the mean percentage of correct

Table 5. Bivariate Correlations (r) of Self-Ratings of Sense of Direction (‘‘How Good?’’) withMeasures of Route and Survey Knowledge

AnticipatoryRecall

SceneRecognition

DistanceEstimation:

MeanAbsoluteError (m)

PathChoices:MeanCorrect

BearingEstimation:

MeanLatency (sec)

BearingEstimation:

MeanAbsoluteError (1)

Number of cardinal references 0.14 Number ofcorrect photos

0.40** On route � 0.03 0.23 � 0.38** � 0.21

Number of landmarks named 0.20 Rank ordercorrelation

� 0.10 Off route � 0.07 0.25 � 0.12 � 0.21

Number of linked actions 0.32* All sites � 0.05 0.29* � 0.27 � 0.26Number of linked landmarks 0.44**

* po.05 and ** po.01, with N5 48 and 2-tailed significance.


path choices. A main effect of sense-of-direction groupwas indicated (F(1,44)5 4.00, MSE5 0.05, p5 .05).GSOD participants selected the correct path to proceedon the nine choice points an average of 7.3 choices (81percent correct), whereas the comparable mean correctfor the PSODgroupwas 6.5 (72 percent). Therewas also amain effect of choice point location (F(1,44)5 63.470,MSE5 0.03, po.01). Participants were 86 percentcorrect at choice points on route and 58 percent correctat choice points off route.

Bearing Estimation. Latency to Point. Table 5 indi-cates that sense of direction was moderately associatedwith the mean latency to point to the end points of theroute from sites on route. Other correlations betweensense of direction and latency were not reliable. Allcorrelations indicated that as ratings of sense of directionincreased, the time taken to point decreased.

To examine individual differences, latency to point wasthe dependent measure for a 2� 2 (gender� sense-of-direction group) ANOVA. No effects were reliable. Toexamine environmental variables, latency was the depen-dent measure for a 2� 2� 2 repeated-measures ANOVA.The independent variables were tests at vantage points onor off the original route, tests at vantage points affordingopen or closed views, and pointing to the start ordestination of the route. Only two main effects werereliable. Participants pointed more quickly when tested atvantage points on route than vantage points off route(mean latencies5 2.7 and 3.6 sec, respectively, F(1, 47)59.57, MSE5 8.75, po .01). Participants also pointedmore quickly when tested at open vantage points thanclosed vantage points (mean latencies52.7 and 3.6 sec,respectively, F(1,47)59.89,MSE58.10, po .01).

Accuracy of Pointing. Theabsolute error of pointingwasdefined as in Experiment 1. Table 5 indicates smalland unreliable correlations between ratings of sense ofdirection and the mean absolute error of the pointing tothe end points of the route.

To examine individual differences, mean absolute errorof pointing was the dependent measure for a 2� 2(gender� Sense-of-direction group) ANOVA. Therewas only a main effect of sense-of-direction group(F(1, 47)5 6.96, MSE5 130.92, po .02). The meanabsolute error of the GSOD group was 201; the meanabsolute error of the PSOD group was 291.

To examine environmental variables, mean absoluteerror of pointing was the dependent measure for a2� 2� 2 repeated-measures ANOVA. The independentvariables were tests at vantage points on or off the originalroute, tests at vantage points affording open or closedviews, and pointing to the start or destination of the route.

There was a main effect of pointing to the start ordestination of the route (F(1, 47)5 31.07,MSE5 764.83,po .01). This effect can be interpreted in light of aninteraction (F(1, 47)5 7.29, MSE5 737.44, po .01).When tests occurred at vantage points on route, themeanabsolute error pointing to the stairs at the startwas 281 andthe mean absolute error pointing to the post at thedestinationwas 201. The effect of pointing targetwasmoreprofound when tests occurred at vantage points off route,371 mean error pointing to the stairs at the start and 141error pointing to the post at the destination. Note thatduring the off-route detour, the post was more recent inmemory and closer in distance than the stairs.

Discussion

Self-ratings of sense of direction were related to avariety of measures of route-learning and wayfinding. Wedid not find performance differences between males andfemales when there was the same number of each sexwithin the groups with high or low self-ratings. Highratings were correlated with recall of direction of traveland associated landmarks, recognition of scenes along theroute, correct choices of paths during route reversal, andlatency of pointing to the end points of the route when onthe route. Consistent with predictions, the group withhigh ratings also showed better accuracy indicatingbearings to the end points of the route when on the route.Nevertheless, high ratings were not differentially associ-ated with superior orienting performance during thedetour or when views were restricted. This pattern isconsistent with the interpretation that people who judgethat they have a good sense of direction competently usestrategies to remember events along a route. Becauseparticipants were told before their initial walk acrosscampus that theywould be asked abouthow they find theirway in new territory, they could reasonably infer that theirwayfinding performance would be assessed. People withhigh ratings may have prospectively encoded landmarksand actions along the initial paths, but these memorieswould require inferences when pointing from sites offroute or sites where distant views were limited.

If the effective use of mnemonics accounts for much ofthe orienting and wayfinding performance shown bypeople with high ratings of sense of direction, theirperformance may not be extraordinary after walking aroute without expecting to lead the way back. The latterresult has been reported twice (Koslowski and Bryant1977; Heth, Cornell, and Flood 2002).

Two results are not compatible with our prediction thatpeople with high ratings would differentially use deadreckoning as a method to infer their bearings during


the walks. Dead reckoning typically involves fixingposition on the basis of records of the direction anddistance of movement from some anchor-point of travel,such as the origin of a route. If dead reckoning had beendifferentially used, people with high ratings would likelyhave shownmore accuratememories of the proportions ofdistance traveled than people with low ratings. Inaddition, dead reckoning by humans involves parsingmovements into episodes of straight travel and turns.With some reflection, a reconstruction of locomotioncould provide a configural representation of the path forsituating external events (Cornell and Heth 2003).However, people with high ratings were not superior topeople with low ratings in ordering scenes photographedalong the route.

Of course, bearings can be estimated by means otherthan dead reckoning. For example, in the present study,recall by people who judged they had a good sense ofdirection indicated that they had associated landmarkswith headings and turns. These memories suggest thattravelers were keeping up to date on their changingdirection relative to the visual surround—that they werepiloting. In addition, bearings could be estimated fromwell-organized static knowledge. Path landmarks near thewayfinder could be used to self-localize or fix one’s positionwithin a representation of the route (Loomis et al. 1999).The direction of the endpoints of the route could then bederived if the representation was in survey form, as if seenfrom above. We see evidence for route configurationknowledge in the next experiment.

Experiment 3

In this third experiment, we examined whether self-ratings of sense of direction are associated with the abilityto create shortcuts across unfamiliar territory. Of course,some shortcuts are easily seen when a wayfinder spots alandmark that appears beyond an upcoming turn in thepath.Approaching the landmark by line of sightmay allowthe wayfinder to reduce travel without knowing muchbeyond the immediate scene. More abstract processes arerequired to infer a shortcut by imagining the configurationof the route from an overhead or survey perspective. Forexample, if the border of a path shows a gradual curve,even if the end of the curve is impossible to see from itsorigin, the wayfinder may imagine how a chord couldconnect the end points of the curve. If the territory on theinside of the curve is judged to be negotiable, the chordcould serve as a shortcut when returning along the path.

Notice that we have described the latter process as aEuclidean inference from a cognitive map. Path integra-

tion could also allow a return to a particular referencepoint on the basis of continual integration of angular andlinear components of locomotion. Laboratory studiesindicate that path integration by humans is replete withcumulative error (Loomis et al. 1999) but a shortcut basedon this dynamic sensing of direction may take thewayfinder into familiar territory near the intendeddestination. The destination can then be found byrecognition of local environmental features (Baker 1981;Gallistel 1993).

These descriptions of different processes of shortcuttingare familiar extensions of the descriptions of processes oforienting during detours. It is of interest to compare whatwayfinders say they do when they attempt shortcuts.Hence, in this experimentwe required participants tomakea shortcut through an unfamiliar suburban neighborhood.We then asked for an explanation of how they chose routes.We expected that people who judged themselves as havinga good sense of direction would devise more efficientshortcuts than people who did not. Because shortcuts mayrequire deliberations en route, efficiency can be revealed byeither the duration or distance of travel. Ratings of sense ofdirection were also requested after the attempted shortcut.The repetition was to assess whether sense of direction wasconsidered to be a relatively stable trait or whetherparticipants altered their self-ratings based on theirperception of their success on the shortcutting task. Inparticular, Heth, Cornell, and Flood (2002) found thatsome wayfinders increased their self-ratings after reachingtheir destination via unfamiliar routes.

Methods

Subjects. Eighty undergraduates (median age: 21.10;range: 17.07–48.0) at our university participated to fulfilla course requirement. When participants arrived for theirresearch appointments, they were first asked to ratetheir senses of direction on the seven-point scale. Partici-pants were not included in this study if they rated theirsenses of direction as 4 (neither good nor poor), if they hadever visited the neighborhoodwhere the testing occurred,or if they were unfamiliar with the lecture theatre thatserved as the destination for the return. As in Experiment2, we selected equal numbers of males and females toconstitute GSOD and PSOD groups. This allowed us toexamine whether there were gender differences inwayfinding performance when male and female studentshad similar appraisals of their senses of direction.

Route. The outgoing walk followed a quiet roadbordering a river valley park (see Figure 2). Beginning at


a large building featuring a tower on the north edge of thecampus, the walk progressed off university grounds andentered an established neighborhood. On one side of theroad were large single-family houses, most situated forviews. Features on the other side of the road includedviewpoint benches, a slope to the river, and a boreal forestgreen belt. As can be seen in Figure 2, the road followed abend in the river valley, so that initial progress to thenorthwest curves toward the southwest. The extent ofthe turn is difficult to judge; because neighborhood streetsintersect the river valley road at T-intersections, travelersoften assume that the river valley road runs east to west.After 1,125m of travel along the river valley road, theroute entered the neighborhood at the fourth T-intersec-tion. With the river road directly behind them, partici-pants were halted prior to the first alley and asked to finda new route to a lecture theatre on campus. Figure 2illustrates the shortest possible route to reach thisdestination (958m).

Three sites along the river valley road were designatedas vantage points, places where half of the participantswere asked to update their position with reference tolandmarks. Each of the vantage points afforded apanoramic view, including a large apartment complex inthe distant skyline.

Procedure. Participants arrived at the campus buildingfeaturing the tower. They were shown the seven-point rating scale for sense of direction and were giventhe opportunity to update their estimate. The participants

were then told that they would be led on a tour into thenearby neighborhood and that they would be asked somequestions about how they find their way in new territory.

Half of the participants were randomly assigned toreceive instructions en route, with the constraint thatequal numbers of males and females and equal numbers ofparticipants with good or poor ratings of sense of directionreceived the instructions.These participantswere stoppedat vantage points and asked, ‘‘Can you at this point updateyour position with reference to some landmarks thatyou have previously seen from a distance? For example, youmight use the position of the sun.’’ After the participanthad looked around and appeared ready to resume thewalk, the researcher asked, ‘‘Ready?Tellme the landmarksthat you chose.’’

Upon arriving at the alley, participants were told, ‘‘Iwant you to imagine that you live in this house and you arelate for class one morning. You need to get to the physicslecture theatre by taking the shortest, most direct routeyou can find. Would you choose to return along the sameroute that we traveled to get here, or would you attempt anew route through the neighborhood?’’ After recordingthe response, the researcher said, ‘‘I would now like you tolead all theway to the entrance doors of the lecture theatreby taking a shortcut through the neighborhood. Youcannot choose any of the paths that we just used. I’ll bewalking right behind you, and I know this neighborhoodquite well, so be assured that you will not get lost. Therearemanyways to go to the lecture hall, and you can choosealleys, streets, or a variety of paved paths.’’ The researcherthen inconspicuously started a stopwatch and beganrecording the participant’s route on a surveymapmountedon a clipboard.

If the participant stopped or asked for help, theresearcher simply said, ‘‘You’re on a possible route, keeptrying.’’ Upon arrival at the entrance doors, the researcherstopped the watch, asked the participant to rate his or hersense of direction again, and asked the participant to‘‘explain themethod they used to select the route throughthe unfamiliar neighborhood.’’ The actual distancetraveled was estimated by retracing the participant’s routewith a map wheel on a 1:2,400 cadastral map. The mapwheel was precise to 10 m. Two experienced map-wheelusers retraced each route.

Results

Self-Ratings of Sense of Direction. Self-ratings of senseof direction were compared using a 2� 2� 2 ANOVA,with between-subjects factors of gender and instructioncondition (instructed to update position versus noinstruction) and the within-subjects factor of self-rating

Figure 2. A survey map of the northwest portion of the campus andthe residential neighborhood. Houses are not represented withinneighborhood lots. The origin of the outgoing walk (dashed line) isindicated byO, the three vantage points are indicated byVs, and thestarting point for the shortcut is indicated by S. The path between Sand D represents the least distance shortcut to the destination.


prior to and after the walk. Only the latter indicated areliable effect (F(1, 76)5 15.57,MSE5 0.85, po .001).The mean rating of sense of direction was 4.1 prior tothe walk and 4.6 after the walk. Table 6 presents thecorrelation between the two ratings by individuals. As inExperiment 2, equal numbers of females and males wereassigned to GSOD and PSOD groups, and this may haveprecluded reliable gender differences in the magnitudeof the ratings. The mean ratings for females and malesprior to the walk was 3.9 and 4.3, SDs5 1.7 and 1.6,respectively.

Landmarks Named. The forty participants who hadbeen instructed to note distant landmarks during theoutgoing walk named features of the environment thatwere close to the road (intersections, houses, street signs)and objects that appeared at a distance (downtownbuildings and features of the river valley park such as a golfcourse, a bridge, and a lake). The total number oflandmarks named across the three vantage points wasanalyzed in a 2� 2� 2ANOVA,with gender and good orpoor sense of direction as between-subjects factors andclose and distant landmarks as a within-subject factor.There was a significant effect of distance of landmark(F(1, 38)5 44.32, MSE5 10.61, po .001). Participantsnamed a mean of 7.8 distant landmarks across the threevantage points and also named a mean of 3.0 landmarksthat were close to the path. No other effects were reliable.

Electing To Take Shortcuts. When asked at the end ofthe outgoing route, fifty-nine participants chose to try anew route through the neighborhood and twenty-oneparticipants preferred to return along the same route thatthey had traveled to reach that point. The number ofmales and females who elected to try a shortcut was thirty-one and twenty-eight, respectively. The number ofparticipants who elected to try a shortcut was nearlyequal in the GSOD and PSOD group—twenty-nine andthirty, respectively. The number of participants whoelected to try a shortcut was also not significantly differentin the groups who did or did not receive instructions toupdate their position along the outgoing walk—twenty-seven and thirty-two, respectively.

Distance of Attempted Shortcut. Regardless of prefer-ences, all participants attempted a shortcut through theneighborhood when requested. The length of chosenpaths in meters was examined in a 2� 2� 2 ANOVA,with gender, good or poor sense of direction and instructedor not instructed to update position as between-subjectsfactors. There were no significant effects or interactions.The mean length of the shortcut to the lecture hall was1194m (SD5 195) for the GSOD group and 1,259 m(SD5 240) for the PSOD group. Five participants withgood ratings and four participants with poor ratings wereable to create shortcuts that minimized travel to the goal.Table 6 indicates the correlation between individualratings of sense of direction andmeters traveled during theshortcut.

Duration of Attempted Shortcut. The duration of theshortcut in minutes was examined in a 2� 2� 2ANOVA, with the same between-subjects factors as inthe preceding analysis.All threemain effectswere reliable.Males took 13min 24 sec to complete their shortcuts,whereas females took 15 min 12 sec (F(1, 79)5 9.02,MSE5 6.73, po .01). Themean duration of the shortcutto the lecture hall was 13 min 38 sec for the GSOD groupand 14 min 56 sec for the PSOD group (F(1, 79)5 5.08,po .05). Themean duration of the shortcut to the lecturehall was 15 min 6 sec for the group that receivedinstructions to update their position during the outgoingwalk and 13min 28 sec for the group that was notinstructed (F(1, 79)5 8.06, po .01). Table 6 indicatesthe correlation between individual ratings of sense ofdirection and minutes of travel during the shortcut.

Explanations of Shortcutting Strategies. Table 7 listsseven categories of explanations that participants pro-vided when asked how they selected their route throughthe unfamiliar neighborhood. Two research assistantsassigned responses to these categories independently;agreement was indicated by a Cohen’s kappa coefficientof 0.80. Disagreements were resolved by discussion. Ten(25 percent) of the GSOD group and seventeen (43percent) of the PSOD group described more than onemethod used along the returnwalk, w2(1,N5 80)5 2.01,

Table 6. Bivariate Correlations (r) of Self-Ratings of Sense of Direction (‘‘How Good?’’) with Measuresof Shortcutting Effectiveness

Ratings after Shortcutting Distance of Shortcut (m) Duration of Shortcut (min)

Ratings before shortcutting 0.65** � 0.20 0.35**

Ratings after shortcutting � 0.26* � 0.47**

Distance of shortcut (m) 0.80**

*po .05 and ** po .01, with N5 80 and two-tailed significance.


n.s. Repetitions of a method by a participant did not addmore to a singular count of their use of that method, butdescriptions of other methods by that participant added acount to those respective categories. Table 7 indicates thefrequency that particular methods were reported, as wellas the percentage of participantswho reported amethodatleast once.

The configuration of the original route was morefrequently reported by GSOD participants than PSOD,w2(1, N5 80)5 4.80, po. 05. Table 7 further indicatesthat methods to estimate shortcuts varied and that themost frequent explanations were classified as intuitive.Separate listings for females and males did not indicatereliable differences in categories of explanations.

A successful strategy is likely to become a mainstay ofwayfinding, and continuing successes may lead to highratings of one’s sense of direction.A significant proportionof participants who reported the configuration of theoriginal route had high ratings, so it is of interest todetermine whether this encoding strategy is effective fordevising shortcuts. We report here post hoc ANOVAs ofthe distance and duration of attempted shortcuts by thetwelve participants who reported the configuration ofthe original route. The four females and eight males werematched on a case-by-case basis with participants whogave identical ratings of sense of direction, and wherepossible, were of the same gender and group assignmentwith regard to instructions to update their position duringthe outgoing walk.

There was a main effect of reported method ofestimation of shortcut on meters traveled during the

shortcut (F(1, 23)5 5.47, MSE5 36,366.57, po.03).Participantswho reported the configuration of the originalroute traveled a mean of 1,087m during their shortcuts,whereas the comparison group, who reported a variety ofstrategies other than noting configuration, traveled amean of 1,269m. The effect of group methods on theduration of the shortcuts was consistent with the analysisof the whole sample, but unreliable: participants whoreported the configuration of the outgoing route traveledfor a mean of 12min 56 sec, whereas the comparisongroup,who reported avariety of other strategies, traveled amean of 14min 15 sec.

Discussion

Our predictions concerning efficient shortcutting wereonly partially supported. Self-ratings of sense of directionprior to attempting the shortcut did not predict distancewalked. Instead, participants with good ratings spent lesstime executing their shortcuts. Records indicated that itwas not unusual for participants with poor ratings to slowor stop while reading street signs, scanning the skyline, ordeliberating at intersections. One of these wayfindersasked the research assistant to wait while she ran ahead tocheck the view from an alternative road. Similarly, femaleparticipants and members of the group that receivedinstructions to update their positions during the outgoingwalk were slower to estimate shortcuts than males andparticipants who did not receive instructions to update.The slower participantsmayhave taken time to determinerelations between distant landmarks during their short-

Table 7. Frequency of Explanations for Choosing a Shortcut by Participants with Self-Ratings Indicatinga Good Sense of Direction (GSOD) or Poor Sense of Direction (PSOD)

GSOD PSOD


Percent ofparticipants(of 40) Frequency


Configuration of original route: ‘‘I knew that Saskatchewan Drive is abig curve.’’ ‘‘Iwanted to take a straighterpath thantheoriginal route.’’ 10 25 2 5

Cardinal direction: ‘‘I had a good idea of where north, south, east, andwest are.’’ 3 8 5 13

Use of distant landmarks: ‘‘I saw the top of ListerHall.’’ ‘‘I kept going inthe opposite direction to the sun.’’ 8 20 12 30

Route features: ‘‘I followed straight roads.’’ ‘‘I looked for busy roads.’’‘‘I paid attention to street numbers.’’ 7 18 13 33

Keyed on original route: ‘‘92nd Avenue looked parallel toSaskatchewanDrive.’’ ‘‘I went left to stay close to the original path.’’ 6 15 9 23

Aesthetic preference: ‘‘I chose the route because it’s shady.’’ ‘‘I wasafraid of getting lost.’’ 1 3 4 10

Intuition: ‘‘It felt like the right way back.’’ ‘‘I knew the generaldirection.’’ 14 35 19 48


cutting attempt. Three of these wayfinders reported thatthey paused to look for buildings they had seen when theshortcut afforded views of the downtown skyline. Hence,it seems that the efficiency of shortcutting was associatedmore with the time to consider landmarks and routes innovel territory than the ability to find the least-distancesolution. Wayfinders who are confident of their senses ofdirection while en route may take less time to deliberatethan those who are not.

Interestingly, self-ratings of sense of direction increasedafter completion of the shortcutting task. Moreover,the ratings after completing the shortcut were reliablyand negatively correlated with both distance traveledand duration of travel. These changes indicate that ratershave labile estimates of their sense of direction and thatevaluation of sense of direction is sensitive to recentwayfinding experiences. Heth and colleagues (2002) alsofound that ratings by adults were reliable in hindsight butnot useful as predictors of route and bearing knowledgebefore retracing a campus route. They incidentallyreported that some children expressed pride in findingthe endpoint of their original route, even though they hadwandered off the paths that theywere supposed to retrace.Although not all of our participants commented at theirarrival at the goal, some volunteered that the shortcutthrough the neighborhood was a risk that they would notnormally take, some considered it to be an adventure, andsome expressed that they now knew better routes formaking the shortcut. We suggest that unassisted arrivalat the goal was considered a success, boosting manyparticipants’ estimations of their abilities to handlewayfinding challenges.

Participantswith good ratings did not report usingmorelandmarks or more distant landmarks than participantswith poor ratings. Both groups seemed to attend tolandmarks in similar ways when instructed to update theirposition. Moreover, students with high ratings did notreport a wider selection of the methods for devisingshortcuts. However, the use of cues to monitor theconfiguration of the route during the outgoing walk maydistinguish effective shortcutters. Participants who notedthe configuration of the original route reduced distancetraveled more than participants who reported otherstrategies. Interestingly, some of the other strategies—such as fixing one’s position in reference to cardinaldirections or the position of campus buildings—can bebased on an azimuthal representation of self, perceivedlandmarks, and goal. Fixes involve estimations of bearings,or lines from self as a point on the horizon to landmarks aspoints on the horizon. However, there are several possibleroutes that can connect places where fixes are taken. Incontrast, a report of the configuration of the original route

indicates that the wayfinder was monitoring their patternof movement more continuously. They could infer ashortcut in relation to a recent curve. The curve could bedirectly perceived by seeing that the road ahead turned tothe left. The extent of the curve could also have beenperceived as bilateral asymmetry of self-movement (pathintegration of turning) or as differential rates ofmovementof environmental events to the left and right (optical flow;Gibson 1979). These processes should be consideredsuggestive, because the verbal protocols did not containsuch detail and were derived from small groups who wereidentified after they had completed their shortcuts.Nevertheless, the results fit with the interpretation thatpeople who effectively make shortcuts represent theconfiguration of routes as they travel.

Experiment 4

A good sense of direction should help when wayfindingindoors. Views to the outside are often restricted inbuildings. Halls may only occasionally afford glimpsesthrough windows, making it difficult to monitor travel inrelation to a large-scale or familiar frame of reference(Weisman 1981). Landmarks in the skyline and vectorssuch as the direction of shadows and wind on the face aretypically not available to provide a bearing. The config-uration of routes within a building complex may becomplicated, and the burden of wayfinding informationfor the new visitor may be left to peculiar graphicalsupports (Passini and Shiels 1987). Most of us are familiarwith the difficulty of interpreting you-are-here maps,remembering color codes for wings, or searching fordirectional signs in visually cluttered and sprawling mallsor hospital complexes.

Perhaps more often than when outdoors, wayfinders inbuildings may monitor their own actions, the extent ofwalking within a corridor, and the direction of turning atvestibules. Dead reckoning indoors may be supplementedby piloting, as wayfinders link actions with interiorarchitecture and signage (Arthur and Passini 1992). Deadreckoning may be used to represent one’s position relativeto a reference point, such as the external entrance to thebuilding. Visitors in buildings may also imagine theiractions within a representation of the layout of thebuilding as seen from outside or from a you-are-here map(Passini 1980; Garling, Lindberg, and Mantyla 1983).Because sense of direction has been associated with theability to mentally coordinate egocentric and imaginedframes of references and to localize landmarks withinbuildings (Lorenz andNeisser 1986; Sholl 1988;Montelloand Pick 1993), we predicted that people who judge


themselves as having a good sense of direction will moreefficiently find their destination within a building thanpeoplewhodonot. Efficiency is indicated by the speed andaccuracy of choosing halls that lead to that destination.

Method

Participants. Seventy-two adults participated (me-dian age 20.10, range 17.7–46.6). There were equalnumbers of males and females. As in Experiment 1,participants were not preselected on the basis of their self-ratings of sense of direction; this allowed examination ofcorrelations using the full continuum of ratings. To ensurea broad distribution of performance, we recruited bothundergraduate university students (N5 36) and volun-teers from the larger community (N5 36). All partici-pants reported that they were unfamiliar with the buildingcomplex that served as the test site. The studentsparticipated to fulfill a requirement of their introductorypsychology course. Nonstudent volunteers participated inresponse to an ad placed in community newspapers. Thead promised feedback about wayfinding abilities, and allparticipants were debriefed about their performance.

Buildings. The study was conducted in Lister Hall, amultiple-unit residence at the periphery of the universitycampus. Lister Hall consisted of three similar but separateresidence towers and a main entrance building housing acommon cafeteria, administration, and recreation room.The entrance building consisted of two levels, and thetowers each had ten floors. Underground walkwaysconnected all three towers to each other and to the mainentrance. Each tower consisted of a Y-shaped floor plan,with three wings that converged on a central foyer. Thetowers were situated on the grounds in such away that theY-shaped floor plans were rotated relative to each other(see Figure 3). Upon arrival on a tower floor, the elevatoropened to the central foyer. Three doorways were equallyspaced along the perimeter of the foyer. The doorwaysindicated access to the wings of rooms, and there was alarge exterior window between two of the doorways. In allthree towers, this window overlooked the main entrancebuilding, albeit from different perspectives. In one towerthewindow facednorth, in another thewindow faced east,and in the third the window faced northeast. Windowblinds allowed control of natural light for a commonwaiting and leisure area in the central foyer.

Procedure. The researcher met the participants at aninformation desk in the main reception area. Participantswere told that the study concerned how people orientthemselves in buildings, in particular how firefighters

might find a room within a building when smoke is seenfrom outside the building coming from that room’swindow. Participants were told they would have to pointto awing containing a room immediately after they arrivedon a floor by elevator. The researcher gave a demonstra-tion of how pointing latency and accuracy would berecorded. Then participants were asked to rate their ownsenses of direction on the three scales used in Experiment1. All three scales were used because of the possibility thatone might be especially sensitive to orienting whileindoors (Montello and Pick 1993). Next, the participantswere led on thefirst of threewalks outside and inside of theresidence complex.

Sequence of Walks. Each walk began at the center rearof the main entrance building, where there was anentrance to the residence grounds. Vantage points on theresidence grounds were selected to afford a view of theappropriate wing, and the researcher stopped at one ofthese sites to point to a targetwindow.Aprominent poster,flag, or aluminum-foil covering marked target windows.The participants were told to take amoment to rememberthe location of the window and to think about how theywould get to that room once inside the tower. Theparticipants were then taken back to enter the center rearof the main entrance building, to progress through theunderground walkways and to go up in the elevator

Figure 3. Asurveymap of the building complex. The three residencehalls are Y-shaped. The vantage point at the start of each walk isindicated by V in a circle at the rear porch of the main entrancebuilding of the complex. Unenclosed Vs indicate other vantagepoints on the grounds.


of the tower that included the target window. When theelevator opened on the fifth floor, participants were askedto point to the wing that contained the targetedroom. Participants were told to be quick and accuratein their pointing, but were told they could look at what-ever they wanted. An electronic stopwatch was used torecord the latency of pointing, defined as the time betweenthe opening of the elevator doors and when eachparticipant stated ‘‘There’’ while stabilizing his or herarm.After recording the direction and latency of pointing,the researcher escorted participants down the elevatorto return through the underground walkways to themain entrance building.After completing the three walks,the participant was asked for each tower how theyestimated the location of the wing that contained thetarget window.

Experimental Conditions. Each participant visited eachtower once. The order of visit to the towers was counter-balanced across participants.Across participants, each of thethree wings of each tower served equally often as the site forthe target window. Across participants, the target windowwasequallyoftenoneachsideofeachwing.Equalnumbersofmales and females were randomly assigned to one of twosimilar conditions for the pointing task. In one condition,blinds on the foyer windows of all three towers were open, sothat participants had the opportunity to use cues from theoutdoors to orient. In the other condition, the blinds wereclosed, allowing only diffuse light from the edges.

These conditions allow tests of several hypotheses. Weexpected that participants who rated themselves with agood sense of direction would point to the targeted wingfaster and more accurately than those who rated them-selves with a poor sense of direction. We expected thatspeed and accuracy of pointing would decrease whenblinds were closed, requiring the participants to remembertheir courses of travel to the choice point or otherwiseimagine their orientation within the tower. We expectedthat pointing would be more rapid in the tower thatcontained a north-facing window. The view to the north isseen as especially discriminative because of the cardinalgrid that is the basis of most buildings and streets in thecity. In addition, a river valley defines the northern edge ofthe campus.

Results

Self-Ratings of Sense of Direction. Analyses of var-iance indicated that differences between self-ratings bymales and females were not reliable, although all threemeasures indicated higher ratings by males. For example,the mean rating of sense of direction on the nine-pointscale asking ‘‘How good is your sense of direction?’’ was 5.1by females and 6.0 by males (F(1, 71)5 3.56, MSE5 4.138, po .07).Table 8 indicates moderate to high correlations

between the different scales presented for participants torate their own senses of direction. Table 8 also indicatesthree small correlations that are reliable and consistentwith the construct validity of self-ratings of sense ofdirection. The self-ratings on the How good? scale werepositively correlated with the accuracy of pointing. Thenumber of people (out of 100) estimated by participants tohave a better sense of direction was negatively correlatedwith the accuracy of pointing and positively correlatedwith the latency to point.

Latency to Point. A between-subjects variable wasformed by assigning participants to GSOD and PSODgroups, depending on whether their self-rating of sense ofdirection was less than or greater than 5 on theHow good?scale. This resulted in a GSOD group of eighteen femalesand twenty-four males and a PSOD group of sixteenfemales and seven males; seven participants rated theirsenses of direction as 5 (neither goodnor bad).To examineindividual differences in latency to point to the entrancedoor of a wing, gender and ratings group were between-subjects variables in a 2� 2ANOVA.Therewerenomaineffects or interactions, although the GSOD group pointedafter amean of 8.1 sec and thePSODgroup pointed after amean of 11.7 sec.

To examine environmental variables, latency wasthe dependent measure for a 2� 3 repeated-measuresANOVA. The independent variables were the between-subjects condition of blinds open versus closed and thewithin-subjects condition of window orientation to thenorth, east, or northeast. There was only a main effect ofblinds open (F(1, 70)5 5.36, MSE5 197.35, po .05).

Table 8. Bivariate Correlations (r) of Self-Ratings of Sense of Direction and Measures of Pointing to the Targeted Wing

Number Better? Easily Lost? Mean Pointing Latency (sec) Mean Accuracy

How good? � 0.83** � 0.76** � 0.20 0.32**

Number better? 0.73** 0.24* � 0.30**

Easily lost? 0.20 0.20Mean pointing latency (sec) � 0.02

* po.05 and ** po.01, with N5 72 and two-tailed significance.


Contrary to our prediction, participants took longer topoint when the blinds were open, a mean of 11.4 sec incomparison to 6.9 sec when the blinds were closed. Thiseffect reflected that participants took time to scan theview when the blinds were open. Nine males and tenfemales of the thirty-six participants in the blinds-open condition walked toward the window to lookoutside before responding; four males and four femalesof the thirty-six participants in the blinds-closedcondition approached or requested to look out thewindow.

Accuracy of Pointing. A point to the door of the wingcontaining the roomwith the target windowwas scored as1, and a point to either incorrect wing was scored as 0. Toexamine individual differences, accuracy of pointing wasdefined by the total correct divided by the three tests of aparticipant. Accuracy of pointing was the dependentmeasure in a 2� 2 (gender� ratings group) between-subjects ANOVA. There was only a main effect of ratingsgroup (F(1, 61)5 7.56, MSE5 0.70, po .01). Meanaccuracy of theGSODgroupwas 0.64, andmean accuracyof the PSOD group was 0.43. The accuracy of pointing bythe GSOD group was reliably above chance performance(0.33), t(42)5 8.86, whereas the accuracy of the PSODgroup was not, po.001, t(22)5 1.57.

To examine environmental variables, accuracy wasthe dependent measure for a 2� 3 repeated-measuresANOVA. The independent variables were the between-subjects condition of blinds open versus closed andthe within-subjects condition of window orientation to thenorth, east, or northeast. None of the main effects orinteractions was reliable.

Explanations of Methods of Estimation. Table 9 listsfive categories of explanations that participants providedwhen asked how they chose the hallway that containedthe target window. Two research assistants assignedexplanations to these categories independently; agree-ment was indicated by a Cohen’s kappa coefficient of0.76. Disagreements were resolved by discussion. Thir-teen of the forty-two GSOD participants (31 percent)reported more than one method for choosing across thethree towers; three of the twenty-threePSODparticipants(13 percent) reported more than one method,w2(1, N5 65)5 1.69, n.s. Repetitions of an explanationby a participant did not add more to a singular count oftheir use of that method, but descriptions of othermethods by the same participant added a count to thoserespective categories. Table 9 indicates the frequency ofparticular methods reported, as well as the percentage ofparticipants who reported a method at least once.

The explanations indicated that GSOD participantstended to use global or community landmarks that werebeyond the foyer window to fix their positions within alarge-scale spatial framework. Fewer PSOD participantsreported this method, w2(1, N5 65)5 4.69, po .05.Separate listings for females and males indicated onereliable difference, in the same category: environmentalfeatures distant from the building complex were reportedto be used by nine females and twenty-one males,w2(1, N5 65)5 6.91, po .01.

Discussion

As noted in Experiment 1, there are high correlationsbetween the different self-rating scales. The results addi-

Table 9. Frequency of Explanations for Choosing a Hallway by Participants with Self-Ratings Indicatinga Good Sense of Direction (GSOD) or Poor Sense of Direction (PSOD)

GSOD PSOD


Percent ofParticipants(of 42) Frequency


Building configuration: ‘‘I used the shape of the building.’’ ‘‘I knew theelevator was in the middle.’’ 6 14 5 22

Updatingduring travel: ‘‘I thinkas I go along.’’ ‘‘I constantly kept trackof where we looked at the window.’’ 10 24 5 22

Global or community landmarks: ‘‘I used the sun to confirm.’’ ‘‘I usedthe Butterdome as a reference.’’ 26 62 7 30

Vantage point and grounds: ‘‘I thought about the right or left handside from outside, then reversed it once inside.’’ ‘‘I looked down tothe place where you showed me the window in the right wing.’’ 7 17 9 39

Intuition: ‘‘I just knew where I was.’’ ‘‘It was instinctual.’’ ‘‘I guessed.’’ 7 17 5 22


tionally indicate that particular scales show reliablecorrelations with some measures of orientation andwayfinding. Nevertheless, all of the latter correlations aresmall tomoderate, and there is no evidence that one ratingis more sensitive to performance variables than any other.

The correlations reflect that participantswith poor self-ratings of sense of direction are slower and less accuratethan those with good ratings. The task was difficult,requiring participants to point to a target that they hadseen from outside a building complex after an obscure tripinside the complex. A group based on high ratings of theirsense of directionwasmore accurate than a groupwith lowratings. As in Experiment 3, long latencies seem to reflectthat participants were considering cues and deliberatingbefore making their response. Most participants tookthe time to consider what could be seen from the foyerwindow. The reliance on visual cues for confirmingbearings was especially obvious when some participantsasked to open the blinds. Many participants took the timeto walk toward the open window to scan outdoors.With afew steps, a participant could see salient campus buildings,the position of the sun, and the border of the river valley—external cues for fixing one’s position. Although therewere no gender differences in the ability to indicate thecorrect hallway, fewer females reported using these distantenvironmental references to direct their pointing. Sholland colleagues (2000) similarly found that females wereless likely than males to orient on the basis of distallandmarks in the large-scale surround. Closer to thewindow, participants could see the grounds and layout ofthe building complex, including the central vantage point.There were no gender differences in the frequency ofreports of these configurational cues.

Participants with high ratings did not report a widerselection of themethods for choosing hallways. The abilityto coordinate imagined perspectives with the immediatesurround was a component of one method. Table 9indicates that sixteen participants reported that theynoted whether the target window was in the left or rightwing when they looked at a tower from the vantage pointoutside. They also noted whether the main entrance tothe tower complex was behind them or in front of them.Then, when the elevator doors opened inside the tower,they assumed that the window they were facing, whetheropen or closed, overlooked themain entrance to the towercomplex. The position of the target wing could then beinferred by imagining a rotation from facing the mainentrance to facing the tower wing. The method isconsistent with the notion that people with a good senseof direction are good at mental rotation, which would berequired even if the window were open. However,psychometric assessments do not show reliable correla-

tions between sense of direction and performance onmental rotation tests (Lorenz and Neisser 1986; Sholl1988). Sense of direction may not be involved, becausethese tasks typically require an object-centered frame ofreference, rather than the requirement to consider oneselfwithin an environmental frame of reference.

As indicated in Table 9, fifteen participants said thatthey updated their positions relative to the outsidevantage point as they progressed through the under-ground halls. These reports are consistent with the dead-reckoning method of navigation. The length and com-plexity of the route would have made dead reckoningextremely difficult if only proprioceptive cues associatedwith locomotion were used. In fact, two participants whoreported they updated their position jokingly asked as theywalked the underground halls, ‘‘Where are the windows?’’Thus, imagination may have been part of dead reckoning,to the extent that wayfinders registered characteristics ofoptic flow in relation to an imagined outdoor surround(Rieser 1999).

Notice that the ability to imagine a vantage point couldaccount for our finding that pointing accuracy did notdecline significantly when windows were occluded. Thetendency to approach the window and the levels of point-ing accuracy indicate that the task was moderatelydifficult even when the blinds were open. It is impressivethat participants who rated themselves with a good senseof direction were significantly better than chance acrossboth of these conditions.

General Discussion

Self-ratings of sense of direction were indeed related toa variety of abilities associated with being oriented inlarge-scale environments. As summarized in Table 1,construct validity is indicated by convergent results indivergent tasks. Participants could accomplish severalof the tasks by using survey knowledge, or fixing theirpositions within a spatial framework that at least repre-sented bearings. Survey knowledge was first indicatedwhenpeoplewithhigher ratings of their senses of directionpointed more accurately to local landmarks that were outof sight. People with higher ratings also more rapidly andaccurately pointed to the endpoints of a recently learnedroute. In addition, people who judged that they had agood sense of direction reported that they were able to usea community or global frame of reference to choose ahallway within an obscure building complex.A good senseof direction was also associated with route knowledge:retention of actions, headings, and scenes at routeintersections was better for people with high ratings.


These performances suggest several interpretations con-cerning the cognitive processes that might be associatedwith sense of direction, gender differences, and the utilityof the rating scales for selection of personnel.

Process Explanations

Within and across experiments, there were a varietyof descriptions of methods used to solve orienting andwayfinding tasks in large-scale environments. Thesedescriptions suggest that orienting and wayfinding, likereading and many other complex human performances,involve several interactive and compensatory cognitiveprocesses. The majority of participants usually reported asingle method to approach any one task, but in Experi-ment 1, different methods were reported for landmarkswith different representations in memory. Similarly, inExperiments 3 and 4, many participants reported usingmore than one method to devise a response and reportedusing differentmethods for responses at different sites or asthe task progressed. The shifts to accommodate features ofthe environment suggest why factor analyses may differ incharacterizing patterns of wayfinding strategies (Lawton,Charleston, and Zieles 1996; Prestopnik and Roskos-Ewoldsen 2000). The pattern of reports is consistent withmodels of executive selection of processes to use readilyinterpretable information, to monitor progress, and toreact to anomalous outcomes. Protocol analyses, taskanalyses, and an array of field and laboratory experimentswill probably be necessary to unravel the coordinationof processes of orienting and wayfinding (Ericsson andSimon 1996).

We found indications of some of the information peopleuse when they evaluate their own sense of direction.Correlations obtained in Experiment 1 show that self-ratings are associated with evaluation of one’s familiaritywith landmarks in the task environment. The correlationswith accuracy of pointing further indicate that familiaritywith landmarks includes knowledge of their spatialrelations. These results suggest that a personmay considertheir sense of direction to be better in familiar thanunfamiliar environments. There are also indications thatpeople adjust their estimates of their sense of direction inaccordwith recentwayfinding experiences. InExperiment3, self-ratings showed only moderate stability following a45-minute task, and more correlations of self-ratings withperformance were reliable after the task than before.Heth and colleagues (2002) reported similar post-taskadjustments. Taken together, the results suggest thatpeople consider their sense of direction to be situationallyspecific.

Gender Differences

Females gave lower estimates of their sense of directionthan males when participants were not preselected onthe basis of their self-ratings (Experiments 1 and 4). Thedifference was not reliable in either of these experiments,but the direction and magnitude of the effect acrossexperiments was consistent. Moreover, the lower self-ratings by females agree with other findings involvingsense of direction scales and othermeasures of uncertaintyand anxiety about wayfinding tasks (Self et al. 1992;Montello et al. 1999).

In contrast, we found little evidence that femalesperformed poorly in actual wayfinding tasks. Females wereless accurate than males in estimating bearings fromimagined vantage points (Experiment 1), but did notreliably differ from males when estimating bearings fromreal vantage points (Experiment 2). Females were some-what slower than males when estimating bearings fromimagined vantage points and executing shortcuts inunfamiliar territory. The slowness may be attributed tomore deliberations and elaborations of explanations fororientation methods by females, which, in turn, mayreflect lack of confidence in the methods they were usingto solve the task at hand. Montello and colleagues (1999)summarized evidence that, on average, females per-form worse than males on speeded spatial reasoningtasks, especially those involving a component of mentalrotation.

In general, females also report reliance on routeknowledge for wayfinding (Lawton 1994; Lawton, Charles-ton, and Zieles 1996). Route knowledge involves asequence of procedures (continuations or turns) linkedto landmarks and paths. Route-based knowledge allowsfor safe and simple repetition of travel, concatenation ofroutes, and geometric inferences by considering therelations between route segments (Bovy and Stern 1990;Golledge, Bell, and Doherty 1994). If, as Montello andcolleagues (1999) suggest, the predominant female style ofenvironmental cognition is route-based, females may feelless practiced and take more time in tasks that requireattention to bearings and distances between land-marks. The latter are components of survey knowledge,which may be predominantly used by males. However,theorists have argued that survey knowledge includesknowledge of the configuration of elements of a spatialarray (Shemyakin 1962; Siegel and White 1975). InExperiment 3, we found no gender differences in thefrequency of reports of shortcuttingmethods involving theconfiguration of the original route or of the parallel layoutof nearby routes. In Experiment 4, we found no genderdifferences in the frequency of reports of methods


involving the configuration of buildings and grounds.Knowledge of configurations allows estimations of bear-ings, so it is possible that females preferentially useconfigural components of survey representations and thatother components take longer to derive.

Utility

The results obtained in the present series of experi-ments indicate small to moderate relations betweenself-ratings of sense of direction and wayfinding abilities.This suggests the possibility that a simple and inexpen-sive method could be used to predict performance. Forexample, a local disaster official might be seeking avolunteer to lead a group charged with contactingevacuees. The official could ask some candidates, ‘‘On aseven-point scale, with 7 being the highest rating, howgood is your sense of direction?’’ Our results do indicatesome limits on such applications. In Experiment 1, theability to point to nonvisible landmarks was related tothe participant’s familiarity with those landmarks, andfamiliarity was part of the correlation between sense ofdirection and pointing performance. Features are un-known in new terrain, so estimates of one’s sense ofdirection could not be supplemented by an estimateof familiarity. Nevertheless, we have seen that people withhigh self-ratingsmay have effective strategies for encodingand organizing memories of features of environments asthey travel. Their evaluation of their sense of directionmay reflect a recent history of using these mnemonicssuccessfully (Experiment 3; see also Heth, Cornell, andFlood 2002). Given that people with high self-ratings areinformed that they will be directing travel, they may beprepared to enact prospective strategies, such as encodingthe configuration of a route.

The study of the strategies used by people considered tohave a good sense of direction may help with the design oftraining to boost the wayfinding performance of otherpeople. For example, observations of hunter-gatherercultures indicate that novices are often instructed to lookback when experienced travelers show them a routeleading away from an important site (e.g., Gould 1969;Nelson 1969). Pathfinders and explorers also look back tobecome familiar with the location and perspective oflandmarks they will see when returning along a route(Gatty 1958). In recent experimental studies, modernurban children and adults were instructed in how to usethe look-back strategy. The result was that they were lesslikely to make errors at intersections when reversing anewly learned route than were members of uninstructedgroups (Cornell, Heth, and Rowat 1992; Heth, Cornell,and Flood 2002). Following this example, our third

experiment provides an explanation of effective short-cutting by participants with high ratings of their sense ofdirection. It remains to be determined whether the skillmay be taught by instructing novices to attend to theconfiguration of the route they are shortcutting.

Conclusions

The findings indicate that a sense of direction is a validcomponent of human wayfinding experience. Peoplereadily summarize their ability to remember routes andcomprehend their surroundings in terms of a sense ofdirection. Moreover, the ability to maintain a senseof direction can be monitored during travel and incorpo-rated into people’s ideas about themselves.

The findings suggest basic implications for behavioralgeographers and cartographers. The construct of a sense ofdirection may be important to models of spatial decisionmaking and choice. It may account for why certainshopping malls profit by proximity to well-known land-marks. The construct of a sense of direction may also beimportant to models of spatial action and activity. It mayaccount for why drivers prefer certain routes that arealignedwithin a cardinal grid. Finally, assessments of senseof directionmay be important for evaluating the aestheticsand effectiveness of maps.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant to Edward H.Cornell from the Natural Sciences and EngineeringResearch Council of Canada. We thank Dianne HadleyandKebbie Josan for their conscientious help with testing.We thank Norman Brown and Alinda Friedman foreditorial help with the manuscript. Correspondenceconcerning this article should be addressed to Edward H.Cornell.

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Correspondence:Department of Psychology,University ofAlberta, Edmonton,AlbertaT6G2E1,Canada, e-mail: [email protected] (Cornell);Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E1, Canada, e-mail: [email protected] (Sorenson);Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E1, Canada, e-mail: [email protected] (Mio).


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Human Sense of Direction and Wayﬁndingweb.psych.ualberta.ca/~ecornell/SOD-Ms.pdf · Human Sense of Direction and Wayﬁnding Edward H. Cornell, Autumn Sorenson, and Teresa Mio Department