Individual differences in spatial navigation and working memory

IQ Research
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Individual differences exist in spatial navigation, and a new study uncovered an important reason why. When testing people who had navigated through a virtual environment, visuospatial working memory (WM) had a correlation that was 8x(!) stronger with outcomes than verbal WM.

Article 1
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Study participants navigated two routes in a virtual space (pictured below), paying attention to the buildings along the way.

Article 2
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They then were given two different outcome tasks: a pointing task in which they had to indicate the direction of a building in the virtual space and a model building task in which the participants were asked to build a map of the virtual space as if it were viewed from above. Both tasks are shown below.

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The results indicated that working memory was a far more important predictor for the outcome tasks. The authors stated, “The conclusion could not be clearer - visuospatial WM accounts for eight times more of the variance in the Silcton total pointing compared to verbal WM” (p. 8).

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This study explains why people who build a “mental map” are better navigators than people who memorize a verbal list of landmarks or directions. It also provides evidence that there are different types of working memory–in this case verbal and visuospatial–that serve different functions in everyday life.

Original post: https://x.com/RiotIQ/status/1950977791039574073?s=20

Link to study: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2025.101932

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The 88% vs 11% split in variance explained is massive and shows that spatial navigation is fundamentally a visuospatial task, not a verbal one. People who try to navigate by memorizing verbal directions (“turn left at the red building, then right after three blocks”) are using the wrong cognitive system. Good navigators build mental maps using visuospatial working memory, which lets them flexibly orient themselves and take shortcuts. This has practical implications: if you struggle with navigation, it’s probably because you’re trying to verbalize routes instead of visualizing spatial relationships. GPS reliance might be hurting visuospatial WM development.

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This explains individual differences in navigation ability way better than just saying “some people have a good sense of direction.” It’s specifically about visuospatial working memory capacity. The pointing and model-building tasks both require you to maintain and manipulate spatial information mentally, which taps visuospatial WM. Verbal WM barely matters because memorizing “turn left, then right” doesn’t help you understand where things are relative to each other. The domain-specific nature of working memory is important, high verbal WM doesn’t compensate for low visuospatial WM in spatial tasks. This suggests IQ subtests measuring different WM types are capturing genuinely different cognitive abilities.