Three experiments investigated the effects of spatial and temporal contiguity in item recognition, location judgment, and distance estimation tasks. Ss learned the locations of object names in spatial arrays, which were divided into 2 regions. The names of locations were presented during map learning so that critical pairs appeared close in space and close in time, close in space but far in time, far in space but close in time, and far in space and far in time. Names primed each other in recognition only when they were neighbors in both space and time. In contrast, the effects of spatial and temporal contiguity in priming in location judgments were additive. Finally, temporal contiguity affected estimates of Euclidean distance when locations were close together, but not when they were far apart.
A series of experiments investigated whether people could integrate nonspatial information about an object with their knowledge of the object's location in space. In Experiments 1 and 3, subjects learned the locations of cities on a fictitious road map; in Experiments 2, 4, and 5, subjects were already familiar with the locations of buildings on a campus. The subjects then learned facts about the cities on the maps or the buildings on the campus. The question of interest was whether or not these nonspatial facts would be integrated in memory with the spatial knowledge. After learning the facts, subjects were given a location-judgment test in which they had to decide whether an object was in one region of the space or another. Knowledge integration was assessed by comparing levels of performance in two conditions: (a) when a city or a building name was primed by a fact about a neighboring city or building, and (b) when a city or a building name was primed by a fact about a distant city or building. Results showed that responses in Condition a were faster or more accurate, or both faster and more accurate, than responses in Condition b. These results indicate that the spatial and nonspatial information were encoded in a common memory representation.When people learn the locations of objects in an environment, they typically acquire nonspatial information about the objects. For example, as students learn the locations of buildings on a campus, they also may learn which departments are housed in which buildings, the relative ages of the buildings, and whether or not a building's architectural style is pleasing. Indeed, as this example suggests, our spatial experiences with objects in an environment are often determined by both nonspatial and spatial properties of the objects.The goal of the research described in this paper was to determine whether people could integrate nonspatial information about an object with their knowledge of the object's location in space. Specifically, participants in these experiments first learned a spatial layout, either a map or a real college campus, and then learned nonspatial verbal facts about cities on the map or buildings on the campus (e.g., "The city Sedona is noted for computer manufacturing" or "Alumni Hall is named for alumni who died in World War I"). Memories of maps and of natural environments are known to support diverse spatial behaviors, including image scanning (e.g
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