Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Pointing tasks have been used for decades to investigate peoples understanding of environmental-scale spaces. Most ofthis research has used the variability of pointing estimates to provide insights into peoples cognitive maps. In pointingexperiments, experimenters need to identify a signal within the trial-by-trial and participant-by-participant variability.However, it is not well understood how characteristics of the task and differences between individuals contribute to pointingvariability. In this paper, I investigated characteristics of pointing tasks and individual differences (i.e., gender, sense-of-direction, familiarity, and strategy use) to provide insights into the factors that influence pointing accuracy and itsvariability. Using the findings of this study, I make recommendations for best-practices in pointing task methods andanalyses.