Spatial memory and perspective taking

Abstract

Giving directions or describing an environment often requires assuming perspectives other than one's own. We employed a spatial perspective-taking task to investigate how describing familiar versus novel perspectives affects subsequent memory. One participant (the director) viewed a display of objects from a single perspective and described the display to another participant (the matcher) from a perspective that varied by 0º, 45º, 90º, 135º, or 180º from the viewing perspective. Following the description, we assessed the director's memory for the display, using judgments of relative direction, scene recognition, and map drawing. The participants imagined and recognized familiar views faster and/or more accurately than novel views. Moreover, different tasks showed different degrees of facilitation for the visually perceived and described views, suggesting multiple representations for different aspects of spatial memory. These findings emphasize the importance of understanding distinctions among spatial experiences and underscore differences in the tasks used to probe spatial memory.

Visual and proprioceptive representations in spatial memory

“…Results from JRDs indicated that performance for both the manually reconstructed orientation and the visually perceived orientation was better than that for novel orientations. 5 Shelton and McNamara (2004) found the same pattern of results when participants verbally described a table-top-sized display of seven objects from nonegocentric perspectives. (Both the described orientation and the visually learned orientation were better than novel orientations in JRDs.)…”

“…Given that learning multiple orientations of the same spatial layout tends to produce a single preferred orientation in memory, we can explore what happens when those learned orientations are encoded by different modalities. For example, previous studies employed this paradigm when the different orientations were learned either through vision and taction (Shelton & McNamara, 2001b) or through vision and verbal description (Shelton & McNamara, 2004), showing the preference for both the visually learned orientations and the nonvisually learned orientations. In the present study, we asked whether a visually learned orientation, a proprioceptively learned orientation, or both orientations were preferred during memory access.…”

How Are the Locations of Objects in the Environment Represented in Memory?

“…One of these experiments was an investigation of spatial perspective taking (Shelton & McNamara, 2001a). One participant (the director) viewed a display of objects from a single perspective and described the display to a second participant (the matcher) from a perspective that differed by 0˚, 45˚, 90˚, 135˚, or 180˚ from the viewing perspective (e.g., Schober, 1993).…”

“…Participants have learned several views of layouts; have learned layouts visually, tactilely, via navigation, and via desktop virtual reality; have been tested in the same room in which they learned the layout or in a different room; have been oriented or disoriented at the time of testing; have been seated or standing during learning and testing; and have been tested using scene recognition, judgments of relative direction, or both (e.g., Christou & Bülthoff, 1999;Diwadkar & McNamara, 1997;Easton & Sholl, 1995;Levine, Jankovic, & Palij, 1982;Mou & McNamara, 2002;Presson & Montello, 1994;Richardson, Montello, & Hegarty, 1999, map & virtual-walk conditions;Rieser, 1989;Rieser, Guth, & Hill, 1986;Roskos-Ewoldsen et al, 1998;Shelton & McNamara, 1997, 2001a, 2001b, 2001cSholl & Nolin, 1997, Exps. 1, 2, & 5; Simons & Wang, 1998).…”

Different mental representations for place recognition and goal localization

“…Our interpretation of this model is that place recognition and locating distant goals would be accomplished in the object-toobject system. 2 The results of several recent experiments indicate that recognizing a configuration of objects and determining where a goal is in relation to a position within that configuration may rely upon different types of spatial information (Shelton & McNamara, 2001b, 2004a, 2004b Determining one's current location and locating a goal relative to one's position are important components of successful human navigation in familiar environments. Several prominent cognitive theories of human spatial memory (e.g., McNamara, 2003;Sholl, 2001;Wang & Spelke, 2002) assume that both behaviors access the same enduring mental representations of the environment.…”