Everyday Wayfinding and Place Memory Assessment for Commuters, Drivers and TravellersSome people build a map in their head. Some just follow the turns. The difference shows up the moment a route is blocked.

Methodology: Thirty-eight original exercises across six formats: ten route-decision rungs delivered as single-choice items, six grid memory spans, six ordering exercises, six select-every-that-applies exercises, five match-the-following exercises and five keyed claims. Construct statement: this instrument measures how a person chooses the next move when finding the way through an unfamiliar place on foot or by car, how they hold the order and direction of a described route, how they read the generic symbols and words that routes are described with, and what they fix in mind before setting off; it also records, entirely apart from all of that, how many lit positions on a grid they can hold for a few seconds. It is not a cognitive screen, not a clinical or medical assessment of memory or attention, not a diagnosis of anything and not evidence for or against any condition: memory and attention move with sleep, medication, illness and disability, and this instrument cannot tell those apart from anything else, so it is never a sole basis for any decision about anybody. Declared response instruction: knowledge, one instruction for the whole instrument; every exercise asks what the best move or the right reading is, never what the respondent would do. Scoring design: C8, path-value trajectory with recovery credit across a fixed-state cascade. The ten rungs describe one journey and every rung states the position reached, which is the same for every respondent, because a fixed item bank cannot branch; the report says so in plain words so that no rung is read as a consequence of an earlier answer. Each option on a rung carries an authored value from zero to three, and the node score is the chosen value less the worst available, divided by the best available less the worst, so the best move from a bad position scores one at that rung and an early error is never counted ten times. The headline is the weighted mean of node scores with later rungs weighted at least as much as earlier ones, expressed against a typical respondent answering at each rung's declared option prior: zero on the headline means no better than the way people typically answer, and the priors are authored assumptions stated in the open that observed answer shares will replace. An unanswered rung leaves numerator, denominator and the chance term together; an empty sitting scores exactly zero; a sitting with fewer than six rungs answered is refused a headline rather than given one, and a sitting with fewer than eight carries a three-way placement and no number. The grid memory strand is excluded from the headline in arithmetic and in words, carries a three-way placement against declared full-recall priors and no number, because six spans cannot support one, and its result is printed apart with the statement that holding positions for a few seconds and choosing a route are different abilities. The orientation, sign-reading and planning strands are each corrected against their own declared priors and carry a placement only. McDonald's omega is reported rather than alpha, estimated before live data from exercise count and a stated assumed inter-item correlation, printed unrounded. No percentile is printed anywhere because no norm group exists. Two fixed habits, always press on and always go back, are priced on the sitting's own rung values and printed so that neither can pass for judgement. Accessibility: the six grid spans are the only timed exercises and their result is reported apart; every other exercise is written and untimed within the sitting; a device with motion turned off shows the grid cells numbered for the same duration. No real city, road, country, map product or navigation app is named anywhere, no exercise requires knowing which side of the road anybody drives on or any one country's sign system, and wherever a direction convention matters it is stated in the exercise. Sources drawn on across the construct: Siegel and White (1975) on the landmark, route and survey progression of spatial knowledge; Thorndyke and Hayes-Roth (1982) on the difference between knowledge from maps and knowledge from moving through a place; Golledge (1999), Wayfinding Behavior, on route choice and decision points; Passini (1984) and Arthur and Passini (1992) on wayfinding as decision-making and on signs and architecture; Hegarty, Richardson, Montello, Lovelace and Subbiah (2002) on the self-report sense of direction and its dissociation from small-scale spatial tests, and Hegarty and Waller (2004) on that dissociation; Ishikawa and Montello (2006) on how spatial knowledge is acquired from direct experience; Lynch (1960), The Image of the City, on paths, edges, nodes, districts and landmarks; Denis, Pazzaglia, Cornoldi and Bertolo (1999) and Michon and Denis (2001) on landmarks at decision points in route directions; Levine (1982) on map alignment and the you-are-here problem; Hill (1998) and Syrotuck (1976) on lost-person behaviour and returning to the last known point; Corsi (1972) on the block-tapping span and Baddeley (1986, 2003) on the visuospatial component of working memory; Uttal, Meadow, Tipton, Hand, Alden, Warren and Newcombe (2013) on the trainability of spatial skills; Garvey, Pietrucha and Meeker (1997) on sign legibility and mixed-case lettering; and Haladyna, Downing and Rodriguez (2002) for the item-writing rules. All exercises are original works written for this instrument; no commercial instrument, span test or navigation product is reproduced, no trademarked test name is used, and no affiliation with any test publisher, map maker or certification body is implied or exists.