Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In the dual-solution paradigm (DSP), people learn a route through a virtual environment. After learning, people are asked tonavigate to locations in the environment. Individuals vary in the degree to which they rely on the learned route (responsestrategy) versus a shortcut (place strategy). The present study characterizes trial-level features such as relative targetlocations, Euclidean distance and number of turns or intersections between locations, and uses a Rasch Model to investigatehow spatial attributes of these trials influence participants strategy-choice. Additionally, a post-task questionnaire shows apartial disassociation between navigation behaviors in the virtual environment and navigation in daily life. It is proposedthat this dissociation can be explained by differences in environment features. This study has unique potential to advanceunderstanding of factors that affect navigation strategy choice, and to inform ecological validity of the Dual SolutionParadigm and other navigation paradigms.