SPATIAL ABILITY AND LAND NAVIGATION UNDER DEGRADED VISUAL CONDITIONS

Land navigation tasks require the use of visual cues. When these cues are degraded by the loss of resolution, navigators suffer varying degr ees of performance decrements. We tested the hypothesis that these dec rements are less severe for people of high spatial ability than they a re for people of low spatial ability. We tested 108 noncommissioned of ficers on a task that required them to determine if two woodland photo graphs taken from different directions (N, NE, E ... NW) were of the s ame location; spatial ability was assessed using the Cognitive Lateral ity Battery. Spatial ability was related to the ability to do this tas k. Furthermore, there was a significant interaction between spatial ab ility and visual resolution on recognition performance. This article d iscusses the implications of these results for teleoperations and land navigation.