Wandering the Virtual Street: Creating an Objective Measure of Navigation Ability

Navigation research is a rich and intriguing field for those interested in the natural differences between individuals, but research in this area is restricted by the need to bring people to a physical location to do testing. For my senior thesis research in Psychology, I designed, developed, and tested a web-based test that sought to measure an individual’s ability to create and update a “mental map” of new environments by asking them to find the shortest path to various points around different virtual environments.