Navigation is coordinated and goal-directed movement through the environment by organisms or intelligent machines. It involves both planning and execution of movements. It may be understood to include the two components of locomotion and wayfinding. Locomotion is body movement coordinated to the local surrounds; wayfinding is planning and decision making coordinated to the distal as well as local surrounds. Several sensory modalities provide information for navigating, and a variety of cognitive systems are involved in processing information from the senses and from memory. Animals update their orientation – their knowledge of location and heading – as they move about. Combinations of landmark-based and dead-reckoning processes are used to update. Humans also use symbolic representations to maintain orientation, including language and cartographic maps. Factors have been identified that make orientation easier in some environments than others. Neuroscience has pointed to the role of certain brain structures in the maintenance of orientation and has uncovered evidence for neurons that fire preferentially in response to an animal’s location or heading. Artificial intelligence researchers develop computer models that test theories of navigational cognition or just create competent robots.

Mental spaces are not unitary. Rather, people conceive of different spaces differently, depending on the functions they serve. Four such spaces are considered here. The space of the body subserves proprioception and action; it is divided by body parts, with perceptually salient and functionally significant parts more accessible than others. The space around the body subserves immediate perception and action; it is conceived of in three dimensions in terms of relations of objects to the six sides of the body: front/back, head/feet, left/right. The space of navigation subserves that; it is constructed in memory from multimodal pieces, typically as a plane. The reconstruction generates systematic errors. The space of external representations, of pictures, maps, charts, and diagrams, serves as cognitive aids to memory and information processing. To serve those ends, graphics schematize and may distort information.

This chapter reviews research on spatial abilities, which is concerned with individual differences in how people mentally represent and manipulate spatial information to perform cognitive tasks. We first review factor analytic studies of spatial abilities. This research tradition provided strong evidence that spatial ability is differentiated from general intelligence and that it is not a single, undifferentiated construct, but instead is composed of several somewhat separate abilities. We next review analyses of performance on spatial abilities tests by cognitive psychologists, which has shown that different spatial abilities may depend more or less on speed of processing, strategies, quality of spatial images, active maintenance of spatial information, and central executive processes. Third, we examine individual differences in large-scale or environmental spatial abilities such as wayfinding and navigation. Research on this topic has begun to characterize the factor structure of large-scale spatial abilities and these abilities’ relation to more traditional measures of spatial abilities. Finally, we consider some of the functions of spatial ability in occupational and academic performance, including surgery, mechanical reasoning, and mathematical problem solving.

This chapter discusses the development of visuospatial representation and thinking. Although development crosscuts all of the issues covered in other chapters in this handbook, it is typically (perhaps unfortunately) discussed separately within cognitive psychology. In this chapter, we offer a focused look at how the spatial abilities of the competent adult come about. Infants begin with certain spatial skills, as nativists have often stressed, and yet these skills change with development, as stressed by other theories including Vygotskyan, empiricist and interactionist approaches. Some important developmental changes include: the reweighting of initial spatial coding systems as the infant learns more about the world, the advent of place learning, and the acquisition of perspective taking and mental rotation. Children also begin to be able to use symbolic representations of space, including maps, models and linguistic descriptions, and they learn to think about space and to use spatial representations for thinking.

We review evidence indicating that mental images, like pictures and percepts, depict rather than describe the represented content, and that visual images rely heavily on the same neural substrate as actual vision. Given this shared substrate, it is perhaps unsurprising that images also show certain sensory effects (e.g., sensory aftereffects) often associated with relatively low-level processes in vision. We argue, though, that images (like percepts and unlike pictures) are organized depictions, perceived within a perceptual reference frame that governs how certain aspects of the form are understood, and we consider some of the implications of this reference frame for image function. Evidence is also presented for a distinction between visual and spatial images, each with its own functional profile and its own neural substrate. Finally, we consider differences from one individual to the next in the vividness of mental images. We argue that, despite the skepticism of many investigators, vividness self-reports are interpretable and meaningfully linked to performance in at least some imagery tasks.

In this chapter we argue that visuospatial working memory offers a useful theoretical construct, possibly open to further fractionation, that can account for a variety of symptoms shown by neuropsychological patients as well as for some important aspects of visuospatial cognition in the healthy brain. We discuss evidence that draws on studies of a range of impairments of visuospatial cognition that arise following focal brain damage in human adults, and specifically the condition known as unilateral spatial neglect, together with investigations of mental discovery and of immediate visuospatial memory in healthy adults. This evidence is incompatible with common assumptions about working memory as a temporary buffer between sensory input and long-term memory. It is also not consistent with assumptions that mental visual imagery and the processes of visual perception share broadly overlapping cognitive functions and/or neuroanatomical networks. It is proposed that visuospatial working memory can be viewed as part of a mental workspace in which visually presented material can be made available in an interpreted form together with other information in working memory derived from other sensory input or from the long-term store of knowledge.

Sex differences are found in a variety of tests of visuospatial abilities ranging from standardized paper-and-pencil or computerized tasks to tests of way-finding ability and geographical knowledge. The size of those differences and their direction vary (although most tasks favor males) depending on the type of skill being tested and the age and background of research participants. Sex differences may relate to differences in processing strategies, discrete underlying processes (e.g., working memory capacity), or expectations. Factors such as neural structure or function, sex hormone exposure, formal and informal learning experiences, and societal stereotypes appear to contribute jointly to these differences. Suggestions for further research include the design of better tests of visuospatial abilities, development of educational programs to enhance visuospatial performance, and a better understanding of the cognitive components that underlie visuospatial abilities, as well as the relationship of visuospatial abilities to mathematics and other cognitive skills.