New Paper Examines the Relation between Environmental Knowledge and Wayfinding Behavior

This research shows that instead of assuming that pointing (direction estimation) and shortcutting (route-based efficient wayfinding) are interchangeable measures of configural knowledge (“cognitive maps”), it is critical to examine psychometric properties, including reliability and discriminability, before selecting measures or interpreting the correlations. Psychometric properties are largely under-reported in the spatial cognition domain but can advance our understanding of individual differences and should be an important foundation of research on cognitive processes underlying complex spatial tasks.