The first one involves landmarks, and the training consists of finding good ones. They need to be highly visible, not ambiguous, and preferably referenced on maps. Following highways is a good strategy.

The second, called dead reckoning, uses the watch and compass. With knowledge of your airspeed, wind speed, and heading, you can estimate your position after a set amount of time.

Usually, a combination of the two is used: dead reckoning between landmarks.

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The article you cite specifically deals with how we encode information when we look at maps, so a few important qualifications. Men encode navigation in terms of distance and direction more than women _when dealing with maps_. I guess it's reasonable to extend the finding to say that men encode in terms of distance and direction more than women in general. Of course the study doesn't prove this, but there's so much other supporting research out there. Anyway, _more than women_ doesn't mean that men are encoding by distances and directions _more than by landmarks and instructions_. Nothing in the abstract of the article you cite supports that claim and I am personally rather skeptical of it.

One sibling comment mentions that '(far more than not) people explain the route based on things trivial to them' (I assume this means "in terms of landmarks and instructions"). If most men were out encoding the majority of their navigation in terms of distance and direction then one would expect to encounter navigation explanations in terms of these ~half the time, yet we don't.

Another comment (though this example feels a lot less persuasive to me) mentions that we use watches and compasses to navigate by distance and direction. If we're so naturally good at navigating with distances and direction why do we need the aid of these tools? In the opposite case we'd be so good at navigating with distance and direction that these tools wouldn't exist, but our visual and verbal memory would be so bad we'd need to carry around pictures and lists to help us navigate. Yet this isn'tt the case.

Anyway, I think you only have to carefully examine how you personally navigate your environments to come to the realization that we naturally navigate mostly (almost exclusively?) in terms of landmarks and instructions. If I had to guess, distances and directions (and some other intuitions such as "place") are really only a feature of spatial awareness which does not normally extend beyond the "room" you're in and the things you're looking at, and which you usually only use to navigate within these immediate spaces. Interestingly, because of this you can sometimes cause weird dissonances by engaging system 2 thinking about the real spatial relationships in you environment. In my case, the room I'm in happens to be contiguous with a bathroom and I happen to be sitting about three feet away from a toilet that others use. Usually I'm not aware of this, but now I feel like my personal space has been weirdly violated.