| Scope and Method of Study. Cognitive scientists, psychologists, and other researchers have endeavored over the past three decades to identify the cognitive functions underpinning human navigation and its possible correlations to other characteristics. The answer to the basic question of how/why some people are good at finding directions and some people are not, is yet to be determined conclusively. It has been reported that a certain percentage of people in the United States and Canada (as the target audience) suffer from what is variously referred to as directional deficiency, direction dyslexia, direction dysfunction, geographical dyslexia, human homing deficiency, or geographic insensitivity.;Findings and Conclusions. Part of the objective of this thesis work was to investigate the ramifications of this deficiency, to explore what this deficiency may correlate with (with a special focus on spatial cognitive skills, programming, and debugging), and to suggest ways of detecting this deficiency. The scope of the thesis work included both theoretical and empirical studies of human direction sensitivity and the cognitive tests that attempt to test hypotheses about individual differences in spatial/temporal attention spans as well as a set of program comprehension questionnaire-based tests about the debugging/testing of computer programs and program comprehension. This was done in the context of the relevant cognitive-based perceptual and spatial tests. The tests results obtained suggest that the programmers' directional detection skills might have some correlations with their program comprehension abilities. |
