Individual Differences in the Evolution of Strategies in Spatial Problem Solving

Navigating the world requires a strategy – you must choose which information to attend to and use from a wealth of internal and external cues in order to find your way. People have biases to prioritize some kinds of information over other. This is, in part, determined by individual differences in cognitive abilities. For instance, some individuals have a bias for spatial information that leads them to not only solve spatial tasks faster but are also more likely to use spatial information to solve tasks even when other information is available. However, peoples' navigation strategies also evolve over time. Although variation in spatial strategies is well documented, it remains unknown if performance on an initial spatial task can predict strategy use over many days of repeated experience. We address this gap here. Participants were tested on mnemonic similarity and object-in-place tasks, common acute tasks of cognitive abilities relevant to navigation. Performance on these tasks was then compared with a virtual navigation task in which participants had to find a random set of objects placed throughout a virtual maze from varying starting points. Participants were shown a set route to each object, although shorter paths (i.e., shortcuts) were possible. This testing was repeated for 13 testing sessions to assess strategy switching over time. We found that performance on the object-in-place task but not the mnemonic similarity task predicted both accuracy and latency in the virtual navigation task. Importantly, object-in-place scores also predicted the rate at which participants deviated from the demonstrated path and adopted shortcuts during repeated virtual navigation. These data suggest long-term navigation strategy use is largely determined by general spatial memory abilities that can be identified in acute tests.