Abstract
The study examined whether people update remote spatial locations in unfamiliar environments during physical movement. Participants learned a layout of objects from one perspective and carried out perspective-taking trials after physically rotating to a new perspective in either the same room as learning or in an adjacent room. Prior to rotation in the adjacent room participants were instructed to visualize the objects as being around them. Responses to perspective-taking trials involved either pointing or verbal labeling. In both testing environments, participants pointed more efficiently from imagined perspectives aligned with either the initial learning perspective or their current facing orientation than from a novel imagined perspective; this indicates that they had updated the encoded spatial relations during the physical rotation and treated remote objects as immediate. Differences in performance among perspectives were less pronounced for verbal labeling in both environments, suggesting that this response mode is more flexibly used from imagined perspectives.
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Notes
We use the term on-line updating to refer to updating that takes place effortlessly during movement as opposed to the deliberate computation of updated spatial relations that may take place following the movement.
Spatial updating studies generally include practice block trials that involve physical rotation. Although it could be argued that completing the physical rotation session might have influenced the pattern of results for the imagined rotation session, the most likely influence would be improved performance for the novel perspective, which would work against our efforts to document a difference between performance for the updated and the novel perspectives.
In line with previous studies (e.g., Kelly & McNamara, 2008), we report latencies based on all data. Analyses based on correct responses only yielded the same findings.
Further testing carried out in our lab confirmed that angles at diagonals often function as attractors of responses. An alternative account is that the large pointing errors stem from the exocentric nature of pointing, i.e., reproducing the directional relation between the pointer and the target (Philbeck, Sargent, Arthur, & Dopkins, 2008).
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by research grant 206912-OSSMA from the European Research Council to M.A. We thank David Waller for useful comments and suggestions on a previous draft of this article.
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Avraamides, M.N., Galati, A. & Papadopoulou, C. Egocentric updating of remote locations. Psychological Research 77, 716–727 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-012-0465-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-012-0465-5