The Development of a Practical Measure of Environmental-Scale Spatial Ability: the Spatial Configuration Task

Date
2014-01-29
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Abstract
The ability to orient and navigate throughout an environment is a fundamental yet complex cognitive skill. This ability may be valuable in certain academic fields (Hegarty, Crookes, Dara-Abrams, & Shipley, 2010) and military occupations (Shanmugaratnam & Parush, 2012), and an assessment of these environmental-scale spatial skills for use in selection or training would be valuable. With this in mind, a new task (the Spatial Configuration Task) was developed and it’s suitability for group testing environmental-scale spatial skills was assessed. The Spatial Configuration Task was demonstrated to be reliable (test-retest reliability r = .814), valid (significantly correlated with the Cognitive Map Formation and Use Tasks; r =-.414, r = .339 respectively), and practical (average duration of 9.69 minutes). This task may have useful applications in selection as well as research, as there are few standardized measures of environmental-scale spatial ability suitable for mass testing.
Description
Keywords
Psychology--Cognitive, Psychology--Experimental, Psychometrics
Citation
Burles, C. F. (2014). The Development of a Practical Measure of Environmental-Scale Spatial Ability: the Spatial Configuration Task (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/28057