A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words, Except When It Isn't

Sorry. Long time, no blog. I had a phone conversation a few days ago with David Kraemer, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. To oversimplify, Kraemer is investigating the idea of "learning styles" (you know, the popular idea in education circles that we are either visual or verbal learners and that instructional materials should be so-catered ).  There are other "learning styles" out there, too, but visual and verbal are two mainstays. But, it turns out there's not a great deal of scientific support for this, says Kraemer, at least not for the theory as it's popularly perceived (i.e. learning styles appear someplace on a visual-verbal continuum, and so the more visual you are the less verbal, etc).

Anyway, Kraemer's adding spatial learning to the visual mix, as differentiated from "object" visual learning (a 3-D vs. 2-D distinction). And, lucky for me, he's testing all of these learning styles as they affect (or don't) our ability to navigate. When I was in Philly, I explored a bunch of desktop virtual cities for him after I filled out a few questionnaires meant to determine if I was more of a verbal or visual or spatial learner, etc. The city explorations were all videos of routes. I floating through a dozen or so deserted intersections, sometimes turning and sometimes not. The testing broke down like this:

1. View pictures of solitary buildings and say whether or not they were part of the city you just explored.
2. View pictures of intersections and say whether you turned right or left, or went straight through, or if the intersection wasn't part of the city you just explored.
3. View a picture of an intersection and then a picture of another intersection elsewhere in the city. "Point" using designated keyboard buttons to indicate what direction the second intersection is from the first.

Before I go into how I did, two caveats. Kraemer's research is still in the pilot phase. He's only tested a couple dozen people, and he's like to test maybe three times that many for good comparative validity. Also, the tests themselves have been evolving (up to and beyond when I did them). For example, my "learning phase" included three looks at each city, whereas some folks only went through each route once, others twice. I was the first to get the benefit of a third time through. On the other hand, in the building ID tests, the view-twice group was shown pictures of buildings as they actually appeared during the city exploration (identical orientation, etc, rather than the whole building in isolation that I had to ID).

Here's something a little spooky. I was the only subject who tested as an equally visual and verbal learner, and I thought for sure the verbal would be advantaged. I'm also really close on the object-spatial distinction, with a slight (surprising) advantage to spatial.

There are some very interesting, albeit tentative findings regarding visual-verbal-spatial learners and how they performed on each of the three tasks. But Kraemer's asked me to hold off on publishing anything until he's run a lot more subjects through the same tasks. So, I'll just report my own performance.

1. In landmark ID accuracy, I was better than all but two subjects in the "view once" group, which Kraemer said was probably a more valid comparison due to the advantage the view-twice group had in that task. But, full disclosure: I was tied for worst performance among the view-twicers.


2. In the intersection test, I pretty much mopped the floor with the view-oncers (I was about 92 percent accurate, and second best was about 52 percent), and I beat all but two of the view-twicers.


3. In the pointing task, what researchers call the "judgement of relative direction," and what's considered the most spatial of all the tests, I was in the top three compared to all the view-oncers and in the top four compared to the view-twicers.

Sure, I was probably a more motivated subject than the average undergraduate in it for $20, and I'll await  the results from more subjects to see if the trend of my above average performance continues. But I really think there's something to ponder here--either these tasks aren't really testing the abilities and skills required for real-world wayfinding, or this is evidence to support my suspicion that, despite how frequently I get lost, I have a very good sense of direction somewhere inside me that just needs to be properly tapped.

Interesting sidenote: Among the view-twicers, there was one subject that kicked everyone's ass, scoring tops in all three tasks and pointing like GPS, getting 65 percent correct in the judgement of relative direction task where the average (among everybody else) was about 22 percent. I hit 27 percent, btw. And that's right, I said HER score. This doesn't by itself mean the gender differences in navigation are all bogus, but it does fly in the face of stereotype.