Individual differences in way-finding and perspective taking: An exploration of gaming experience, gender, and landmarks

Classic models have informed research exploring how people represent large scales spaces. It has focused on the function, nature, and development of cognitive maps; with salient landmarks aiding in this development. Individual differences such as experience, gender, and spatial ability have also been found. We explored individual differences in video-game players and non-players and gender differences. We also explored the importance of landmarks in the development of cognitive maps. As hypothesized, gamers learned the maze better than non-gamers; but a trend suggested that this was limited to spatial knowledge (location of landmarks) for males. Structural landmarks were better than objects and similarity between landmarks hindered the development of both procedural and spatial representations. The hypothesized advantage of statue landmarks was not found.