Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Large-scale spatial abilities have long been recognized as a central component of human cognition, underlying navigation, wayfinding, and the integration of spatial information across extended environments. Despite their importance for everyday functioning and learning, these abilities have remained comparatively underrepresented in standardized assessment research. Widely used instruments such as mental rotation or spatial visualization tests target situations in which spatial information can be apprehended from a single viewpoint and manipulated without bodily movement (small-scale spatial abilities). Research has repeatedly shown that performance on such tasks overlaps only partially with performance in navigation and wayfinding, suggesting that large-scale spatial abilities involve additional cognitive processes related to embodiment, sequential decision-making, and the integration of spatial information over time. While small-scale spatial abilities are routinely measured using well-established psychometric instruments, large-scale spatial abilities are most commonly investigated using navigation tasks that are tailored to specific experimental settings. As a consequence, studies often rely on highly heterogeneous environments, task designs, and outcome measures, which substantially limits comparability and standardization across studies.