Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Human navigation relies on an array of complex cognitive processes. Integral to this is the ability to imagine an environ-ment, then orientate oneself within it relative to imagined features. This is particularly important to those who navigatethe world without vision. The cognitive mechanisms for this process remain unclear and thus require further investigation.In this study, we investigated the ability of individuals to form mental representations of an environment based on verbaldescriptions. Blind and sighted individuals took part in two separate tasks. In task 1, participants were required to drawthe layout of a described environment, in task 2, judge their orientation relative to a global reference point in an imaginarypath integration task. In line with previous non-verbal description studies investigating navigation in the blind, sighted notblind individuals could form global representations of spatial layout and orientation that may aid flexible wayfinding.