Spatial Abilities for Architecture: Cross Sectional and Longitudinal Assessment With Novel and Existing Spatial Ability Tests.

This study examined individual differences in spatial abilities of architecture students. Students at different educational levels were assessed on spatial ability tests that varied in their domain-specificity to architecture, with the hypothesis that larger differences between beginner and advanced students will emerge on more domain-specific tests. We also investigated gender differences in test performance and controlled for general reasoning ability across analyses. In a cross sectional study, master students (N = 91) outperformed beginners (N = 502) on two novel tests involving perspective taking and object composition, as well as on a standardized visualization of cross-sections test, but not on a standardized mental rotations test. Longitudinally (N = 117), spatial performance improved after the first bachelor year on visualization of cross-sections, object composition and mental rotation. Although both genders showed higher spatial test performance with increased experience, male students outperformed females across tests and levels of education. The results overall confirmed improvements in spatial performance during architecture studies, with partial support for the domain-specificity hypothesis. A gender gap among advanced students calls for further examining architecture-specific spatial thinking.

Hippocampal and prefrontal processing of network topology to simulate the future.

Topological networks lie at the heart of our cities and social milieu. However, it remains unclear how and when the brain processes topological structures to guide future behaviour during everyday life. Using fMRI in humans and a simulation of London (UK), here we show that, specifically when new streets are entered during navigation of the city, right posterior hippocampal activity indexes the change in the number of local topological connections available for future travel and right anterior hippocampal activity reflects global properties of the street entered. When forced detours require re-planning of the route to the goal, bilateral inferior lateral prefrontal activity scales with the planning demands of a breadth-first search of future paths. These results help shape models of how hippocampal and prefrontal regions support navigation, planning and future simulation.

Seeing the axial line: evidence from wayfinding experiments.

Space-geometric measures are proposed to explain the location of fixations during wayfinding. Results from an eye tracking study based on real-world stimuli are analysed; the gaze bias shows that attention is paid to structural elements in the built environment. Three space-geometric measures are used to explain the data: sky area, floor area and longest line of sight. Together with the finding that participants choose the more connected street, a relationship is proposed between the individual cognitive processes that occur during wayfinding, relative street connectivity measured through space syntactic techniques and the spatial geometry of the environment. The paper adopts an egocentric approach to gain a greater understanding on how individuals process the axial map.