Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Judgments of relative direction (JRD) have been frequently used to understand peoples mental representation of outdoorand indoor spaces. In JRD experiments, 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 betweenindividuals contributes to performance variability. In this paper, I investigated task characteristics (i.e., reference framesused in instructions, orienting and target headings, and distances between headings) and individual differences (i.e., gen-der, sense-of-direction, familiarity, and strategy use) to provide insights into the factors that influence JRD accuracy andvariability. Using the findings of this study, I make recommendations for best-practices in JRD methods and analyses.