The acquisition of vector knowledge and its relation to self-rated direction sense

Self-rated sense of direction is reliably related to people's accuracy when pointing in the direction of unseen landmarks from imagined or actual perspectives. It is proposed that the cognitive substrate of accurate pointing responses is a vector representation, which is defined as an integrated network of displacement vectors. Experiment 1 isolated the body senses and tested displacement vector formation in a path-integration task. Experiment 2 isolated the visual modality and tested displacement vector formation in a virtual-learning task. Both experiments tested whether people reporting a good sense of direction (GSOD) were more likely to compute displacement vectors than people reporting a poor sense of direction (PSOD). The results showed that both GSOD and PSOD people computed displacement vectors in the path-integration task, but not in the virtual-learning task. When interlandmark relations were visually specified, GSOD people made more accurate pointing responses than PSOD people, adding to a growing body of cognitive correlates of self-rated direction sense.