Grounding person memory in space: Does spatial anchoring of behaviors improve recall?

Abstract

In two experiments, we examine and find support for the general hypothesis that memory for behavioral information in the context of an impression formation task depends on where that information is located in vertical space. These findings extend earlier work showing that memory for location and shifts of spatial attention are influenced by the ''good is up'' metaphor. Specifically, we show that person memory is better for behavioral information in metaphor compatible locations (positive in upper space and negative in lower space) than in metaphor incompatible locations (positive in lower space and negative in upper space). These findings show for the first time that person-specific information, and person memory in general, is structured spatially. Copyright # 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.The impressions we form of others constitute important markers guiding the way we navigate our social world. Not surprisingly, the subject of impression formation has occupied center stage in social psychology from its early beginnings (Allport & Allport, 1921;Anderson, 1965;Asch, 1946;Hamilton, Katz, & Leirer, 1980a;Hastie, Ostrom, Ebbesen, Wyer, Hamilton, & Carlston, 1980;Srull, 1981). A focus on the nature of the mental representations underlying how we think about persons and analyses of the processes driving such thinking shaped the course of the field, leading to the development of increasingly sophisticated bodies of theory about the nature of mental representations, their impact on judgments, and the nature of variables affecting information processing (e.g., Wyer & Srull, 1989; for reviews see Smith, 1998;Wyer & Carlston, 1994). In this view, person cognition became the construction and manipulation of inner representations, with the implicit assumption that knowledge about persons is dissociated from any sensory base and thus amodal (e.g., Wyer & Srull, 1989). However, cognition is constrained by the properties of our evolved brains and bodies (Semin & Smith, 2002Smith & Semin, 2004). Adopting an embodied view of person cognition casts this field in the active context of navigating the social world suggesting that like other cognitive processes, impressions are structured by the incorporation of sensorimotor and affective elements.The current research was designed to investigate the general hypothesis that valenced behavioral information acquired in the course of our daily social interaction can be anchored spatially. These experiments extend earlier work (cf. for a review Crawford, 2009) that has demonstrated that memory for location and shifts of spatial attention are influenced by the ''good is up'' metaphor, and that memory is better for valenced stimuli that appear in metaphorcompatible locations (positive in upper space and negative in lower space) than those that appear in metaphor-incompatible locations (positive in lower space and negative in upper space). We will do so by exploring for the first time the ''good is up'' metaphor in a standard person memory paradigm. Specifically, we examined in two exp...

Action Contribution to Competence Judgments: The Use of the Journey Schema

“…In the domain of attention, Moeller et al ( 2008 ) showed that when individuals were presented with a metaphor “good is up/bad is down,” individual differences in perceived social power had an impact on spatial attention in a metaphor-consistent manner. In the domain of memory, Crawford et al ( 2006 ) showed that individuals remember the metaphor “good is up” better when it is presented in a higher position (see also Palma et al, 2011 ). In the domain of attitudes, researchers showed that political attitudes can be understood in terms of a horizontal spatial axis (Oppenheimer and Trail, 2010 ; Farias et al, 2013 ), morality in terms of cleanliness (Schnall et al, 2008 ), good and moral in terms of bright color, and bad and immoral in terms of black color (Meier et al, 2007 ; Sherman and Clore, 2009 ).…”

An Exception to Mental Simulation: No Evidence for Embodied Odor Language

“…Consistent with this, Andrade and Donaldson (2007) found reduced odor recognition memory with a concurrent odor task during encoding compared to a concurrent verbal or visual task. Alternatively, memory performance could be improved because the overlap may increase overall activation, thereby strengthening the memory trace (as in Engelkamp, 2001;Palma, Garrido, & Semin, 2011;Parzuchowski & Szymkow-Sudziarska, 2008).…”

Embodiment of abstract categories in space… grounding or mere compatibility effects? The case of politics

“…Research to date has documented that abstract concepts like "affect", "power" or "time" implicitly activate spatial associations (e.g., Boroditsky, 2000;Crawford, Margolies, Drake, & Murphy, 2006;Körner, Topolinski, & Strack, 2015;Lakens, Semin, & Garrido, 2011;Meier & Robinson, 2004;Palma, Garrido, & Semin, 2011;Schubert, 2005). More recently, others have shown that the political categories of left and right are represented horizontally in space (e.g., van Elk, van Schie, & Bekkering, 2010;Farias, Garrido, & Semin, 2013;Garrido, Farias, & Semin, 2015;Oppenheimer & Trail, 2010).…”