Individual differences and situational factors can both affect how and how well one navigates. This study examinedthe effects of stress and spatial ability, measured as mental rotation ability, on navigation during an emergency situation.Participants learned a virtual mall environment and were subsequently either told to meet a friend at the far exit (control) orto use the far exit to escape a fire. In an emergency, participants made an initial movement faster, made more errors duringnavigation, and overestimated the amount of time they took to exit relative to controls. Relative to controls, emergency lowspatial participants more often reversed a learned path to exit the mall, whereas high spatial participants more often directlyused a previously learned path. The results illustrate that stress from an emergency situation negatively impacts navigation, andthat the behavioral consequences of this are in part dependent upon one’s spatial abilities.

Landmarks can be helpful guides when completing spatial tasks, such as giving directions. Past research has shown that the salience of landmarks can influence their use, with salience based on perceptual features, or on the spatial relation between the landmark and a target location. In two experiments, students were asked to give directions to locations on campus to other students, alumni, or visitors. In Experiment 1, speakers’ ratings of the imaginability and frequency of use for 20 buildings along the directed paths impacted whether they were included in their directions to other students. In Experiment 2, these features did not impact speakers’ directions to alumni or visitors, suggesting a different prioritization of salience. These results suggest that the experience of the speakers and the identity of the receivers play a role in which landmarks speakers choose to include in their directions.

Along with using geometric information to define spatial terms such as “in”, Coventry and Garrod (2004) have proposed the use of dynamic-kinematic (DK) routines which relate to how two objects interact (kinematic) over time (dynamic). For the spatial description, “The penny is in the bowl,” the penny is contained by a bounding box around the bowl as well as the DK location-control routine that if the bowl moves, so will the penny. In two experiments a speeded prime/ probe picturesentence verification task was used to gather evidence for the existence of DK routines. The first experiment found evidence for priming location-control for the preposition “in”. The second experiment examined location-control routines for both “in” and “on” using the same prepositions for both location-control and embedded spatial relationships. A significant response time benefit for priming location-control routines was found. These experiments provided evidence for priming location-control routines independent of semantic priming.