Regarding spatial cognition, this study confirms that individual visuo-spatial abilities are fundamental in supporting environment learning in young adults (Hegarty et al. 2006; Wolbers & Hegarty, 2010), and also shows that several visuo-spatial abilities (e.g., VSWM and rotation ability) support environment recall in older adults too. What also emerges is that their role changes as a function of the type of task, being more important when it involves having to imagine adopting different views, and less so when it involves repeating a route learned or graphically reproducing it. This broadens and complicates the picture of what we know about environment learning and how individual differences matter. Spatial cognition models take this complexity into account by considering not only individual variables but also the features of an environment. The model proposed by Carlson, Ho€lscher, Shipley, and Dalton (2010), for instance, intersects individual visuo-spatial abilities, the spatial structure of the environment, and the in- dividual's cognitive map, and spatial tasks are managed by a
simultaneous combination of these three aspects. Cognitive maps are therefore influenced not only by individual differences in visuo- spatial abilities, but also by such features of an environment as the visibility of the route and the geometrical relationships between different parts of the space (Werner & Schindler, 2004). Although such findings are interesting, further studies need to focus more on how environment representation is influenced by the interaction between internal (e.g., visuo-spatial abilities) and external (e.g., features of the environment) aspects. Having experimented with our well-structured environment, in future research it will be interesting to examine how visuo-spatial abilities modulate the mental representation of highly versus scarcely structured environments.