Abstract
The current study examined the potential influence of existing spatial knowledge on the coding of new spatial information. In the Main experiment, participants learned the locations of five objects before completing a perspective-taking task. Subsequently, they studied the same five objects and five additional objects from a new location before completing a second perspective-taking task. Task performance following the first learning phase was best from perspectives aligned with the learning view. However, following the second learning phase, performance was best from the perspective aligned with the second view. A supplementary manipulation increased the salience of the initial view through environmental structure as well as the number of objects present. Results indicated that the initial learning view was preferred throughout the experiment. The role of assimilation and accommodation mechanisms in spatial memory, and the conditions under which they occur, are discussed.
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Notes
Depiction of this data suggested the possibility of a sawtooth pattern of performance that is indicative of an intrinsic reference frame (Mou & McNamara, 2002). An intrinsic contrast (contrast weights with a minimum at 0° = −1.625, 0.375, −0.625, 1.375, −0.625, 1.375, −0.625, 0.375; Greenauer and Waller 2008) was fit to this data and was found to describe the data well, F(1, 17) = 5.79, p = .028. However, although this contrast was able to account for 21.50 % of the variance associated with imagined heading, unlike the quadratic contrast it left a significant amount of variance unaccounted for, F(6, 119) = 3.82, p = .003.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported in part by a grant (European Research Commission grant OSSMA 206912) to the third author. We thank Marios Theodorou, Yianna Armosti, Margarita Panayiotou, and Christina Michael for their assistance in conducting these experiments.
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Greenauer, N., Mello, C., Kelly, J.W. et al. Integrating spatial information across experiences. Psychological Research 77, 540–554 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-012-0452-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-012-0452-x