The practice of speleology: What is its relationship with spatial abilities?

Given the evidence of motor and exploring activities being related to spatial abilities on different scales, the present study considers the case of speleology, a peculiar underground exploratory activity. The relation of this practice with spatial abilities was examined. The study compares a group of expert speleologists (18), a group with a reduced amount of experience in speleology (19 novice speleologists), and a group with a similar amount of practice but in the outdoors (19 experts mountaineers). Group differences will be investigated in terms of (i) small-scale spatial task performance (rotation-based and spatial working memory); (ii) large-scale environment learning (reproduced using verbal descriptions) asking participants to learn a path through a cave or up a mountain (in a counterbalanced order) and then to test their recall with true/false spatial questions and graphical representation tasks; and (iii) self-reports of wayfinding attitudes. The results of linear models showed that, after controlling for age, gender, years of education, and vocabulary scores, expert speleologists had greater mental rotation and perspective-taking abilities and less spatial anxiety than expert mountaineers, and the former performed the true/false questions better than the latter. It should be noted that participants who reported having guiding/path-finding experiences had greater accuracy in graphical representation performance and higher scores in attitude towards orientation. Overall, expertise in speleology is related to spatial abilities on different scales and might have a distinctive role in comparison with other motor practices, pointing to the potential value of examining speleology in the spatial cognition framework. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10339-022-01075-4.