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Mental representations of recently learned nested environments

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Abstract

Two experiments investigated the mental representations of objects’ location in a virtual nested environment. In Experiment 1, participants learned the locations of objects (buildings or related accessories) in an exterior environment and then learned the locations of objects inside one of the centrally located buildings (interior environment). Participants completed judgments of relative direction in which the imagined heading was established by pairs of objects from the interior environment and the target was one of the objects in the exterior environment. Performance was best for the imagined heading and allocentric target direction parallel to the learning heading of the exterior environment, but the effect of allocentric target direction was only significant for the imagined headings aligned with the reference axes of both environments; in addition, performance was best along the front-back egocentric axis (parallel to the imagined heading). Experiment 2 used the same learning procedure. After learning, the viewpoint was moved from the exterior environment along a smooth path into a side entrance of the building/interior environment. There participants saw the array of interior objects in the orientation consistent with their movement (correct cue), the array of objects in an orientation inconsistent with their movement (misleading cue), or no array of objects (no cue), and then pointed to objects in the exterior environment. Pointing performance was best for the correct-cue condition. Collectively the results indicated that memories of nested spaces are segregated by spatial conceptual level, and that spatial relations between levels are specified in terms of the dominant reference directions.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on request.

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Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (41871371, 31200776), Jiangsu Overseas Visiting Scholar Program for University Prominent Yong & Middle-aged Teachers and Presidents, Qinglan Project of Nanjing Normal University, Starting Research Fund from Nanjing Normal University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, 210097, People’s Republic of China

    Yao Wang, Xiaohan Yu, Yan Dou & Jing Li

  2. Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, 37203, USA

    Timothy P. McNamara

Authors
  1. Yao Wang
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  2. Xiaohan Yu
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  3. Yan Dou
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  4. Timothy P. McNamara
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  5. Jing Li
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Contributions

YW, XY, YD, and JL contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by YW and JL. The first draft of the manuscript was written by XY. TPM, JL and YD commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Jing Li.

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The authors have no conflicts of interest related to this project.

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Approval was obtained from the IRB of School of Psychology, Nanjing Normal University. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Wang, Y., Yu, X., Dou, Y. et al. Mental representations of recently learned nested environments. Psychological Research 85, 2922–2934 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01447-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01447-5

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