Object  The influence of human factors on wayfinding performance is essential to improve the us‍er experience of intelligent navigation service.

  Method  Based on four cognitive abilities, i.e. mental rotation, abstract reasoning, spatial short‐term memory and spatial perception, this paper conducts several spatial cognitive experiments to analysis the correlation between spatial cognitive abilities and wayfinding performance.

  Results  The results indicate that: (1) These four spatial cognitive abilities are weakly correlated with each other, and can be separated partly with reference to the scale of recognition space. Specifically, cognitive group with mental rotation ability and abstract reasoning ability, and cognitive group with short‐term memory ability and spatial perception ability, have stronger correlation respectively concerning the same space scale. While those groups where cognitive abilities cross different scale space have week correlation. (2) Mental rotation ability and abstract reasoning ability have higher significance and goodness of regression fitting on wayfinding performance. Considering the combined effect of multiple cognitive factors, in virtual scene, the mental rotation ability shows the highest influence while the spatial perception ability has the lowest influence; in real scene, the spatial perception ability shows the highest influence and the short‐term memory ability has the lowest influence. (3) The wayfinding performance has significant scene effect with respect to the real and virtual scenes, i.e. the determinant coefficients of cognitive factors for wayfinding performance fitting varies with the scene type.

  Conclusions  These results provide an empirical refer‍ence for the effectiveness of pedestrian navigation research based on virtual scene. It can also serve as a basis for the design of navigation service considering human factors.