Is the Map in Our Head Oriented North?

Abstract

We examined how a highly familiar environmental space--one's city of residence--is represented in memory. Twenty-six participants faced a photo-realistic virtual model of their hometown and completed a task in which they pointed to familiar target locations from various orientations. Each participant's performance was most accurate when he or she was facing north, and errors increased as participants' deviation from a north-facing orientation increased. Pointing errors and latencies were not related to the distance between participants' initial locations and the target locations. Our results are inconsistent with accounts of orientation-free memory and with theories assuming that the storage of spatial knowledge depends on local reference frames. Although participants recognized familiar local views in their initial locations, their strategy for pointing relied on a single, north-oriented reference frame that was likely acquired from maps rather than experience from daily exploration. Even though participants had spent significantly more time navigating the city than looking at maps, their pointing behavior seemed to rely on a north-oriented mental map.

Not all memories are the same: Situational context influences spatial recall within one’s city of residency

“…However, as we point out in the supplementary material, unreported data from another experiment (Frankenstein et al, 2012) suggest, first, that location perspective recall of configurations is also observed in a map-drawing task and at a somewhat remote location (the distance test location-city center-was similar to that in another study that had observed default recall: Basten et al, 2012). This makes sense, since the plaza layout was likely learned from local navigational experience.…”

“…This explanation by view preactivation cannot hold for the present experiment. Configurational knowledge-specifically, within Tübingen-is represented within a single north-up reference frame (Frankenstein et al, 2012), not within a graph structure (Meilinger, Frankenstein, & Bülthoff, 2013) suited for activation spread. Furthermore, activation spread would predict no influence of body orientation, which we, however, observed.…”

“…This alignment is surprising, since alignments involve costs (Meilinger, Berthoz, & Wiener, 2011) that participants could have avoided by simply recalling configurations in the northup frame, knowledge of which is encoded in long-term memory (Frankenstein et al, 2012 Fig. 3 Frequency of map orientations when body orientation and location perspective were aligned, orthogonal, or contra-aligned.…”

“…The first motivation for the present study was to test whether adjustment would also be observed in a situation never explored before, in which only one mechanism, mental rotation, would be applicable: recalling configurational or survey knowledge (i.e., the spatial relations between mutually nonvisible locations). This knowledge is represented within a single, north-up-oriented reference frame (Frankenstein, Mohler, Bülthoff, & Meilinger, 2012)-explicitly for Tübingen, where the present study was conducted. Participants might mentally rotate recalled city configurations to adjust to the current location.…”

“…By testing recall at different locations around a target area with people in different body orientations, including an offset between body orientation and location perspective, ours was the first study to estimate which reference frame is relevant for recall in an everyday environment. In addition to body orientation and location perspective, we also tested whether participants recalled configurational knowledge north-up, since this was the reference frame orientation in which this knowledge was memorized within longterm memory (Frankenstein et al, 2012). Finally, we also examined whether the home perspective-that is, the perspective onto the target area from a participant's home (e.g., south when living north of the target area)-influenced spatial memory recall, since this would be the perspective onto the target area most often experienced by participants.…”