Individual Differences in the Allocation of Visual Attention During Navigation

Individual differences exist in the ability to create an accurate mental survey representation (i.e., a cognitive map) of a novel environment, yet the mechanisms underlying differences in cognitive map accuracy are still under investigation. To determine whether differences in overt attention allocation contribute to these individual differences, the current study examined whether looking times to landmarks and other objects while navigating in a dynamic virtual environment were related to cognitive map accuracy. Participants completed a battery of spatial tests; some tests assessed spatial skills prior to the navigation task (the Santa Barbara Sense of Direction Scale and the Spatial Orientation Test), and others tested memory of the virtual environment Silcton after an exploration period (a landmark recognition task, a direction estimation task, a map-building task, and a route construction task). Individuals with inaccurate cognitive maps of Silcton, as measured by the direction estimation and map-building tasks, showed equivalent eye fixations to buildings and objects when exploring Silcton as those with accurate maps. Despite similar looking times, the inaccurate mappers were significantly worse at judgments of relative direction between landmarks in Silcton and showed poorer memory for landmarks in Silcton than accurate mappers. These findings suggest that cognitive mechanisms, such as mental perspective-taking, occurring after attention allocation underlie differences in cognitive map accuracy. Public Significance Statement Individuals vary in their ability to create a mental map of a new environment, and it could be that people who form weak maps do not look at the same objects in the environment as people with accurate maps. The main findings that people with weak cognitive maps look at items at the same rate as people with strong cognitive maps, yet those with weak maps remember fewer of those items suggests that the source of individual differences is not differences in visual attention but differences in memory processing.