Effect of semantic clustering on the memory of spatial locations.

Hirtle, Stephen C.; Mascolo, Michael F.

doi:10.1037/0278-7393.12.2.182

Cited by 65 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Encoding spatial information verbally in this way can account for many biases found in spatial memory. For example, it may account for biases in the memory of locations (Fitting, Allen, & Wedell, 2007;Huttenlocher et al, 1991); biases in the angles of intersections (e.g., Tversky, 1981); and it may mediate grouping effects due to political, semantic, or conceptual similarities (e.g., Carbon & Leder, 2005;Hirtle & Mascolo, 1986).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Working Memory in Wayfinding—A Dual Task Experiment in a Virtual City

2008

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This study examines the working memory systems involved in human wayfinding. In the learning phase, 24 participants learned two routes in a novel photorealistic virtual environment displayed on a 220• screen while they were disrupted by a visual, a spatial, a verbal, or-in a control group-no secondary task. In the following wayfinding phase, the participants had to find and to "virtually walk" the two routes again. During this wayfinding phase, a number of dependent measures were recorded. This research shows that encoding wayfinding knowledge interfered with the verbal and with the spatial secondary task. These interferences were even stronger than the interference of wayfinding knowledge with the visual secondary task. These findings are consistent with a dual-coding approach of wayfinding knowledge.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Working Memory in Wayfinding—A Dual Task Experiment in a Virtual City

2008

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“…Nonspatial characteristics of an environment are perceived and incorporated into one's cognitive map along with spatial features (McNamara et al, 1992;McNamara & LeSueur, 1989). When this information has categorical structure, people cluster locations on the basis of their function (Hirtle & Jonides, 1985;Merrill & Baird, 1987), their physical similarity (Hirtle & Kallman, 1988), and the semantic category into which they fall (Hirtle & Mascolo, 1986). Social information, unlike function, physical similarity, or semantic identity, is indirectly linked to locations; it has stronger associations to people associated with the locations than to the locations Hypotheses.…”

Section: Structuring Spatial Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social influences on spatial memory

et al. 2008

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“…Tversky, 1981), or made symmetric (Palmer, 1975). Furthermore, items that are a constant distance apart are judged to be closer together when they are perceived to belong to the same region than when they are perceived to belong to different regions (Coren & Girgus, 1980;Hirtle & Mascolo, 1986).…”

Section: Biases In Geographical Judgmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reasoning about geography.

Friedman¹,

Brown²

2000

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

152

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To understand the nature and etiology of biases in geographical judgments, the authors asked people to estimate latitudes (Experiments 1 and 2) and longitudes (Experiments 3 and 4) of cities throughout the Old and New Worlds. They also examined how people's biased geographical judgments change after they receive accurate information ( "seeds" ) about actual locations. Location profiles constructed from the pre-and postseeding location estimates conveyed detailed information about the representations underlying geography knowledge, including the subjective positioning and subregionalization of regions within continents; differential seeding effects revealed between-region dependencies. The findings implicate an important role for conceptual knowledge and plausible-reasoning processes in tasks that use subjective geographical information.Geographical units like cities, provinces, countries, and continents are almost always irregular in shape and area; in their orientation relative to the cardinal points of the compass; and in their alignment relative to adjacent geographical units. Yet they also fit into a simple hierarchical scheme in which towns and cities are nested within provinces, provinces within countries, and countries within continents. It is obvious that people know about the spatial aspects of world geography as well as the hierarchical relations among geopolitical entities, and it is equally obvious that their knowledge is imperfect. What is less clear is how imperfect geographical knowledge is represented and how it is coordinated and weighed when used in making judgments.The tendency to normalize irregular shapes, combined with the tendency to develop a conceptual understanding of the hierarchical relations between geographical units, implies that geographical intuitions can be biased. In this article, we focus on understanding what geographical biases imply about how people encode, store, and use geographical knowledge in making judgments about locations. We take the position that most geographical biases result from plausible-reasoning processes that operate on complex beliefs about global geography and that few biases result from distortions of perceptually based representations. We conclude that the "mental map" metaphor is a misleading analogy for the representation of geographical knowledge and that the plausible-reasoning framework can account for much of the data in the subjective geography literature.We explored the nature of geographical biases by asking This research was supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. We thank Ed Comell and Peter Dixon for thorough and thoughtful reading of a draft. We also thank Javier Movellan for suggesting that the seeding method could be used to study subjective geography.

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Effect of semantic clustering on the memory of spatial locations.

Cited by 65 publications

References 21 publications

Working Memory in Wayfinding—A Dual Task Experiment in a Virtual City

Working Memory in Wayfinding—A Dual Task Experiment in a Virtual City

Social influences on spatial memory

Reasoning about geography.

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