Spatial text processing in relation to spatial abilities and spatial styles

The present study examined how people’s spatial abilities and spatial preferences for representing environmental information influence the ways in which they represent information from spatial descriptions. Spatial individual differences can have a central role in sustaining the mental representation deriving from survey and route descriptions. A group of 48 undergraduates listened to survey and route spatial descriptions and performed a sentence verification task on their content. They were then administered two spatial tasks, the Mental Rotation Test (MRT) and the Minnesota Paper Form Board (MPFB), plus a self-rating scale on sense of direction and spatial representation. The results showed that spatial abilities influenced the recall of survey and route texts differently. The MPFB and the MRT positively predicted the accuracy of answers on the survey text, which was negatively predicted by a preference for a route representation. Preference for a survey representation was positively associated with the accuracy of answers on the route text. Taken together, these results support the existence of a relationship between spatial abilities, spatial styles, and the processing of spatial language that depends on whether a route or a survey perspective is adopted.