Up north and down south: implicit associations between topography and cardinal direction

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Spatial Cognition
• Human Navigation

Background:

• Route planners exhibit a bias towards selecting south-relative to north-going routes between east-west landmarks.
• This tendency suggests a potential "north-is-up" heuristic, but its origin remains unclear.
• Existing evidence does not strongly support explicit strategy use as the cause of this bias.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the source of the south-route bias in route planning.
• To test if implicit associations between cardinal directions and topography underlie this bias.
• To differentiate the influence of implicit versus explicit associations on route planning.

Main Methods:

• Adapted Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure automatic associations between cardinal directions (north/south) and topography (mountainous/level).
• Experiments conducted with participants from diverse geographical regions (New England and Midwestern US) to control for local topography.
• Route planning tasks to assess the predictive power of implicit and explicit associations on directional preferences.

Main Results:

• Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated automatically activated associations: north with mountainous terrain and south with level terrain.
• Experiment 3 confirmed these associations were not specific to the local topography of New England.
• Experiment 4 revealed that implicit associations between cardinal direction and topography were stronger predictors of southern route bias than explicit associations.

Conclusions:

• Implicit associations between cardinal directions and topographical features can influence spatial conceptualization.
• These physically unfounded implicit associations partially explain the observed preference for southern routes in navigation.
• Understanding implicit biases is crucial for explaining human spatial cognition and navigation behaviors.