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© The Author(s) 2021. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http:// creat iveco mmons. org/ licen ses/ by/4. 0/. The structure of human intellect can be conceptualized as consisting of three broad but correlated domains: verbal ability, numerical ability, and spatial ability (Wai et al. 2009). Verbal and numerical abilities are traditionally emphasized in the classroom context, as the phrase "the three Rs" (reading, writing, and arithmetic) suggests. However, research has increasingly demonstrated that spatial ability also plays an important role in academic achievement, especially in learning STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) (National Research Council 2006; Newcombe 2010). For example, envisioning the shape or movement of an imagined object contributes to the understanding of intersections of solids in calculus, structures of molecules in chemistry, and the formation of landscapes in geology. Spatial thinking is a broader topic than spatial ability, however (Hegarty 2010). We use symbolic spatial tools, such as graphs, maps, and diagrams, in both educational and everyday contexts. These tools significantly enhance human reasoning, for example, graphs are a powerful tool to show the relationship among a set of variables in two (or higher) dimensions. STEM disciplines use these tools frequently, and, in addition, often have specific representations that students need to master, such as block diagrams in geology. Although teachers may assume that these representations are easy to read, maps, diagrams and graphs often pose difficulty for students, especially those with low spatial ability (e.g., a graph that shows changes in an object’s velocity according to time) (Kozhevnikov et al. 2007). As well as understanding spatial representations that are provided by teachers or in textbooks, good spatial thinkers can choose or even create representations that are suitable for the task at hand. Novices tend to prefer representations that are realistic and detailed, often more realistic and detailed than necessary because they include irrelevant information (Hegarty 2010; Tversky and Morrison 2002). Being good at spatial thinking entails the ability to select and create appropriate spatial representations, based on sound knowledge of content in a specific domain. Navigation is a special kind of spatial thinking, which requires us to understand our location (where we are) and orientation (which direction we are facing) in relation to the surroundings. Sometimes, we may construct reasonably accurate mental representations of the environment ("maps in the head" or "cognitive maps"). However, people often have difficulty with cognitive mapping (Ishikawa and Montello 2006; Weisberg and Newcombe 2016), especially in environmental space (beyond figural or vista space), when we cannot view a layout in its entirety from a single viewpoint (Ittelson 1973; Jacobs and Menzel 2014; Montello 1993). People thus need to move around and integrate separate pieces of information available at each viewpoint in a common frame of reference, which poses extra cognitive processing demands (Han and Becker 2014; Holmes et al. 2018; Meilinger et al. 2014). Spatial orientation and navigation may be problematic for some people even with maps or satellite navigation (Ishikawa 2019; Liben et al. 2002).