Object Persistence Enhances Spatial Navigation

Abstract

Violations of spatiotemporal continuity disrupt performance in many tasks involving attention and working memory, but experiments on this topic have been limited to the study of moment-by-moment on-line perception, typically assessed by passive monitoring tasks. We tested whether persisting object representations also serve as underlying units of longer-term memory and active spatial navigation, using a novel paradigm inspired by the visual interfaces common to many smartphones. Participants used key presses to navigate through simple visual environments consisting of grids of icons (depicting real-world objects), only one of which was visible at a time through a static virtual window. Participants found target icons faster when navigation involved persistence cues (via sliding animations) than when persistence was disrupted (e.g., via temporally matched fading animations), with all transitions inspired by smartphone interfaces. Moreover, this difference occurred even after explicit memorization of the relevant information, which demonstrates that object persistence enhances spatial navigation in an automatic and irresistible fashion.

Supporting spatial orientation during route following through dynamic maps with off-screen landmark persistence

“…A finer granularity of measurement and mapping of the glancing between device and environment may help to explain how people use map interfaces in the wild, particularly if participants are encouraged to vocalize their actions. For example, the continuous presence of some landmarks as symbols on the edge of the Dynamic map could be studied from the perspective of object persistence in graphical interfaces (Liverence & Scholl, 2015). More importantly, it would enable us to understand how participants treat static and dynamic symbols when they are represented on the same platform, but differ in their stability (as was a feature of the dynamic map here).…”

“…In order to achieve this, map symbols placed around the edge of the local map, indicating the direction to landmarks of particular types that are "off the map," might avoid the conscious zooming of the screen and help to represent some of the spatial context that might support spatial orientation with the broader landscape. The rationale for the continuous display of symbols representing off-screen landmarks of interest is supported indirectly by the work of Liverence and Scholl (2015), who emphasize the importance of object persistence in graphical interfaces. This is, of course, not a novel idea, and videogame designers have very successfully explored the use of in-game mapping systems where a mini-map showing local detail might be augmented with dynamic map symbols, representing different task-related landmarks or targets, around its edge.…”

Modeling Search Behaviors during the Acquisition of Expertise in a Sequential Decision-Making Task

“…Indeed, we use a task repetition criterion to ensure learning and make forgetting more difficult (Corazzini et al, 2008 ). Eventually, when dealing with more complex search scenarios, taking into account that the user might forget a previously encountered location might be necessary (Baumann et al, 2011 ; Liverence and Scholl, 2015 ). Nevertheless, we account for apparent reductions in the user's knowledge of the BDT structure using the random model to penalize actions that, according to the model's encoding of the user's previous actions, represent mistakes in landmark choices.…”