Name: Maugan Lloyd

Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal Meeting

Time: Tuesday February 10th, 2026 – 10 AM Eastern Time

Location: Room 150 or https://gatech.zoom.us/j/99965936875

Advisor: Dr. Scott Moffat (Georgia Tech)

Dissertation Committee Members:

Dr. Robert Ariel – (Virginia Wesleyan University)

Dr. Thackery Brown – (Georgia Tech)

Dr. Paul Verhaeghen – (Georgia Tech)

Dr. Steven Weisberg – (University of Texas at Arlington)

Title: Individual Differences in Metacognition and Navigational Strategy: A Behavioral and Eye-Tracking Study

Group differences in navigation task performance favoring younger over older adults and males over females are well documented, yet these headlines may obscure more interesting nuances in the data. Weisberg et al. (2014) uncovered groups of navigators differing by strategy and performance: those who integrate spatial information into a cognitive representation (integrators), those with strong route knowledge who struggle with such integration (non-integrators), and those who perform poorly across the board (imprecise navigators). This study aims to clarify the strategies that may lead to group membership using eye tracking coupled with metacognitive judgements of learning (JOLs) in an immersive VR environment. Participants will be led along fixed, overlapping routes and instructed to learn the locations of buildings encountered. They will then be placed at each building and asked to point to the other buildings in both the same and the alternate route. Pointing accuracy between routes will demonstrate whether participants used an integrated survey representation of the whole environment, whereas within-route accuracy demonstrates their route knowledge. Differences in gaze behavior may reflect underlying memory encoding strategies that impact group membership. Eye-tracking data will quantify visual attention patterns during encoding and help distinguish effective from ineffective strategies. Corresponding absolute and relative metacognitive JOLs will shed light on participants’ awareness in the task to give further insight into strategy application. Participants will also be given a virtual Y-maze paradigm as an alternative measure of strategy preference that can be compared to behavioral and metacognitive data obtained in the pointing task. Findings will elucidate the factors that contribute to individual differences in spatial cognition and will inform future work comparing younger and older adults and offer foundational insights for personalized navigation interventions.