Individual differences in the representations of novel environments

The present research investigated individual differences in representations of a novel environment. Thirty-eight participants traversed an unfamiliar route over two floors of a building and drew sketch-maps of the route. Participants also completed a mental rotation task and route knowledge tasks: orientation (pointing to nonvisible landmarks), landmark recognition, route tracing on a floor plan, and route retracing tasks. Based on spatial accuracy, participants' sketch-maps were classified as one-dimensional, two-dimensional, and three-dimensional, and the types of sketch-maps were associated with participants' spatial ability and their performance on route knowledge tasks. Our findings showed that individual differences in visual-spatial abilities predicted the types of environmental representations that adults formed and thus provide evidence against stage/sequential models that attribute differences in environmental representations exclusively to differences in experience.