Which way is the bookstore? A closer look at the judgments of relative directions task

ABSTRACT

We present a detailed analysis of a widely used assay in human spatial cognition, the judgments of relative direction (JRD) task. We conducted three experiments involving virtual navigation interspersed with the JRD task, and included confidence judgments and map drawing as additional metrics. We also present a technique for assessing the similarity of the cognitive representations underlying performance on the JRD and map-drawing tasks. Our results support the construct validity of the JRD task and its connection to allocentric representation. Additionally, we found that chance performance on the JRD task depends on the distribution of the angles of participants’ responses, rather than being constant and 90 degrees. Accordingly, we present a method for better determining chance performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitive map
• judgments of relative direction (JRD)
• map-drawing task
• map sketching
• group-level nonparametric permutation test

Acknowledgment

We thank Rebecca Mata, Michelle Occhipinti, and Nikhil Jaha for assistance with data collection. We thank members of the Human Spatial Cognition Lab, especially Michael Starrett and Jared Stokes, for helpful conversations about this project. Finally, we thank the editor, Dr. Daniel Montello, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

¹ Our focus here is on pointing tasks and map-drawing tasks, thus the discussion of distance estimation tasks is limited.

² We will refer to such tasks as “the SOP task” because this task could theoretically be solved using a mixture of egocentric and allocentric information (Ekstrom et al., 2014, 2017).

³ In our simulations we used mean angular error for comparison to previous studies.

⁴ We thank an anonymous reviewer for recommending a paired t-test approach.

Additional information

Funding

Research supported by grants from NSF Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences [BCS-1630296] and NIH National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke [R01NS076856] awarded to Arne D. Ekstrom. Research also supported by a Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Individual National Research Service Award from the National Institute of Mental Health [F32MH116577] awarded to Derek J. Huffman. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.