Studying Individual Differences in Spatial Cognition Through Differential Item Functioning Analysis

Abstract

Background: In the field of spatial cognition, the study of individual differences represents a typical research topic. Gender and age have been prominently investigated. A promising statistical technique used to identify the different responses to items in relation to different group memberships is the Differential Item Functioning Analysis (DIF). The aim of the present study was to investigate the DIF of the Landmark positioning on a Map (LPM) task, across age groups (young and elderly) and gender, in a sample of 400 healthy human participants. Methods: LPM is a hometown map completion test based on well-known and familiar landmarks used to assess allocentric mental representations. DIF was assessed on LPM items two times: on categorical (i.e., positions) and coordinate (i.e., distances) scores, separately. Results: When positions and distances were difficult to assess with respect to the intended reference point, the probability to endorse the items seemed to get worse for the elderly compared to the younger participants. Instead other features of landmarks (high pleasantness, restorativeness) seemed to improve the elderly performance. A gender-related improvement of probability to endorse distance estimation of some landmarks, favoring women, emerged, probably associated with their repeated experiences with those landmarks. Overall, the complexity of the task seemed to have a differential impact on young and elderly people while gender-oriented activities and places seemed to have a differential impact on men and women. Conclusions: For the first time DIF was applied to a spatial mental representation task, based on the schematic sketch maps of the participants. The application of DIF to the study of individual differences in spatial cognition should become a systematic routine to early detect differential items, improving knowledge, as well as experimental control, on individual differences.

Cognitive Efficiency and Fitness-to-Drive along the Lifespan: The Mediation Effect of Visuospatial Transformations

“…Future investigations need to overcome this limitation with appropriate cut-off scores for young and adult drivers. Finally, the employment of more ecological measures of driving performance with respect to those used in this study (i.e., simulated driving and real-world driving) may help to clarify whether the effects of both mental rotation and perspective-taking would be observable even on simulated and/or real-world driving [63]. Similarly, models presented here could benefit from the inclusion of measures of topographical representations (i.e., egocentric and allocentric) [22,64,65] in order to also study the role of large-scale spatial representations, thus making possible a more complex predictive model.…”

The Road More Travelled: The Differential Effects of Spatial Experience in Young and Elderly Participants

“…As stated in the introduction section of the present study, familiarity with the environment could be also considered an extension of the concept of affordance: the way in which people approach/interact with their environments is guided by different purposes (e.g., [ 106 , 107 ]). Landmarks carry with them general meanings and functions that make them particularly helpful for navigating new environments (“that looks like a hospital ”, “I see a bridge ahead that crosses the river”) [ 108 ]. Further, their individual meanings become particularly helpful in well-known environments (“that building is the Municipality, where I requested the identification document ”, “this is the right turn that takes us home ”) (e.g., [ 63 ]).…”

The contribution of field independence in virtual spatial updating

“…The encoding alignment effect may be reduced by increasing the familiarity with the environment (e.g., Nori and Piccardi 2011;Lopez et al 2020a;Lopez et al 2020b;Lopez et al 2020c), by acting on motor, proprioceptive and vestibular information (Rossano et al, 1999;Sun et al, 2004), by manipulating the environmental features (Sholl and Nolin, 1997), such as the symmetry of the layout, the geometric structure of the enclosing space and the external cues (McNamara, 2003). Specifically, in trapezoidal, rectangular and square rooms the encoding alignment effect was reduced while it was increased in a circular room (e.g., Kelly et al 2008;Mou et al 2007), even for people with cognitive impairment (Caffò et al 2018).…”