Individual differences in the representations of novel environments

The present research investigated individual differences in representations of a novel environment. Thirty-eight participants traversed an unfamiliar route over two floors of a building and drew sketch-maps of the route. Participants also completed a mental rotation task and route knowledge tasks: orientation (pointing to nonvisible landmarks), landmark recognition, route tracing on a floor plan, and route retracing tasks. Based on spatial accuracy, participants’ sketch-maps were classified as one-dimensional, twodimensional, and three-dimensional, and the types of sketch-maps were associated with participants’ spatial ability and their performance on route knowledge tasks. Our findings showed that individual differences in visual–spatial abilities predicted the types of environmental representations that adults formed and thus provide evidence against stage/sequential models that attribute differences in environmental representations exclusively to differences in experience. r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.