Map-based Navigation: Individual Differences in Perspective Taking and Path Integration

Spatial navigation is an everyday activity that necessitates multiple cognitive processes, including map reading, perspective taking, and path integration (tracking position and orientation during self-motion). These processes must work in concert to enable individuals to orient themselves and locomote to goal locations, but it remains unclear whether proficiency in one type of spatial processing necessarily implies proficiency in other forms of spatial processing during navigation. Here, we study the processes of transforming a map-indicated viewpoint to locate and move to surrounding invisible targets in a simple open arena. Participants (n = 210) performed a novel immersive Viewpoint Transformation Task (iVTT, He et al., 2022), a map-based navigation task in a virtual environment in which people first viewed a map of an environment from a top-down perspective, then physically walked to a goal location (specified on the map) in an immersive virtual environment, using a first-person perspective. We examined the effects of spatial perspective taking (using the Spatial Orientation and Money Roadmap Tasks) and path integration (using the Triangle Completion Task) on individual differences in task performance. In a regression analysis, a measure of perspective taking and a measure of path integration independently predicted iVTT performance. Notably a small number of participants (5%) exhibited difficulty with the initial perspective taking step. Our results suggest that both the ability to assume a different perspective to plan movement and the use of path integration to update one's position while executing the movement contribute to effectively utilizing map-based information during navigation.