Empathy, spatial and verbal abilities characterize one who can best describe a route

We investigated the characteristics of people who provided the most intelligible description of a route. 18 participants were asked to describe the route on their own campus. Then, participants completed the Japanese Wechsler Adults Intelligence Scale-Revised and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index. Subsequently, 72 raters 36 university students who were familiar with the environment and 36 students who were unfamiliar) were asked to read and rate each of the 18 descriptions on a 7-point scale based on intelligibility of the verbal descriptions. Analysis indicated that a person who can provide the most intelligible description of the route has a higher empathic concern, which is necessary to consider intelligibility of the description to the addressees as well as higher spatial abilities, which are relevant to spatial representation of the route.