Reposted from my log:
At the symposium on Friday, researchers tossed around the terms "good navigator" and "bad navigator". One way they determined who was who:
Santa Barbara sense-of-direction scale
Hegarty et al 2002, "Development of a self-report measure of environmental spatial ability," Intelligence 30:425-447.
Email me if you're interested in reading the article and do not have access.
Scoring:
https://labs.psych.ucsb.edu/hegarty/mary/sites/lab...
The recommended scoring procedure for the scale is to first reverse score the positively phrased items. This ensures that all items are coded such that a high number indicates more ability and a low number indicates less ability. The items that should be reverse scored are items 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, and 14. After reverse scoring, then sum the scores for all of the items together, and then divide the total by the number of items (15) to compute the overall score for the scale (average score across items). Using this technique, the score will be a number between 1 and 7 where the higher the score, the better the perceived sense of direction. Using this SPSS syntax will ensure proper scoring.
Tests of spatial skill
Particularly enjoyable:
Topo map assessment (Except for the computer generated 3D images which I find annoying)
My questions:
- Are these abilities learnable?
- How would you teach children so they gain this sense of direction?
- Does a sense of direction correlate with other cognitive abilities?
- Does teaching children to orienteer help them to think and learn?
- If so, how can we measure and prove that?
More papers I would like to read:
- Review article on spatial navigation ability. Link
- Mental rotation and perspective-taking are distinct spatial abilities (2001). Link
- People do research on Presence (2007). Link
- How do researchers assess spatial knowledge acquisition from direct experience in the environment? (2006). Link
- Back to the discredited science of phrenology? Link Bigger hippocampus --> better mental map-making. On the other hand, Maguire showed that you can grow your hippocampus with intensive study of the terrain and maps.
- Research with kids and maps, with hints of possible educational interventions. Link
- Electrical stimulation of your brain might help you navigate better. Link
- Cognitive mapping in humans and its relationship to other orientation skills (2012). Link
- If you want to study a map prior to running on new terrain, should you sleep on it? Link
- People worry that GPS navigation is making us all dumber - we blindly follow the instructions of the machine without understanding the big picture. Here is an idea for having the wayfinders train the user, increasing their spatial awareness while giving directions. Link
- What strategies are useful for working with children who have mental disorders? In this paper, they find that kids with autism spectrum disorder are less interested in exploring their environment - unless there is a game-like goal. Link
- Not sure I agree with the first sentence of the abstract (what about bees' dances?), but interesting nonetheless. Children as young as 4 have natural abilities to read maps. Here they do experiments with kids and maps, and distinguish between abiltiies to represent distance and angle. Link
- Oo! Oo! "Trace Logan and Tom Lowrie argue that while little attention is given to visual imagery and spatial reasoning within the Australian Curriculum, a significant proportion of NAPLAN tasks require high levels of visuospatial reasoning. This article includes teaching ideas to promote visuospatial reasoning in the primary classroom." Link
Back to Santa Barbara.
Thoughts on answering the survey questions myself: I feel that I am good at map-reading and spatial reasoning -- but that there is also an attentional component for me. I'm not necessarily constantly aware of my surroundings, subconsciously. For example, if I'm the passenger with a friend driving me somewhere, I'm probably focused on the conversation with the friend and could easily pay no attention to the route we're taking. And then there's the question of remembering where I put stuff - I'm terrible at that. So I think there are different aspects to spatial cognition, and the survey kind of mashes them all together.