The WALKABOUT 1 Running head: VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS AND SPATIAL ABILITIES The WALKABOUT: Using virtual environments to assess spatial abilities

Computer-simulated virtual environments offer promise for assessing peoples’ spatial abilities in large environments. This paper introduces the WALKABOUT, a task that simulates navigation through a large space by using dynamic 3-D computer graphics. Preliminary results indicate that performance on the WALKABOUT is moderately predictive of the ability to point to unseen familiar locations in a large-scale (campus) environment. In particular, latencies from a measure of the ability to change from a ground-level to a bird’s eye perspective are significantly correlated with pointing to unseen campus locations.