Switching between environmental representations in memory

Abstract

In everyday life we accomplish tasks that require the storage and access of mental representations of different environments that we are not currently perceiving. Past research has suggested that environments are encoded by a series of independent representations that are organized in memory. Three experiments tested this idea further by asking whether multiple representations of environments can be accessed simultaneously. Using a cued task-set switching paradigm, subjects judged spatial relationships between target locations in two familiar environments. Response times were longer when successive trials probed different environments, an effect not due to switching between semantic categories or semantic priming, suggesting that representations of environments are accessed sequentially. Implications for various hypotheses concerning the properties of environmental representations are discussed. q

Testing the exclusivity effect in location memory

“…As well as exploring the interplay of allocentric and egocentric frames of reference in memory for object location, scholars have also explored the interactions between multiple allocentric representations. For instance, Brockmole and Wang (2002) explored switching between multiple representations of space. They asked participants (all current Professors at the University of Illinois, for at least 2 years prior to testing) to make judgements about the location of objects in two familiar environments: 1) the Psychology building, and 2) their own office.…”

“…However, exclusive recall has been shown in both location memory (Brockmole and Wang, 2002) and other areas of memory recall (Rohrer et al, 1998;Maylor, Charter & Jones, 2001). Therefore, if time is not a limiting factor and participants are instructed to recall a target object's location accurately not quickly, it ought to be possible for participants to utilise multiple representations of target location and subsequently generate recall accuracy consistent with either independence or superadditivity.…”

Simultaneous spatial updating in nested environments

“…For example, Brockmole and Wang (2002) showed that after a direction judgment about things in one environment is made (e.g., one's office), people are slower in making a judgment about things in a different environment (e.g., the building) than in making a judgment about things in the same environment, suggesting there is a cost in changing environments. It is possible that switching from campus to room (which is required in the updatecampus condition) is easier than switching from room to campus (which is required in the update-room condition), because a mental image of the campus includes the room, but not vice versa.…”

“…Thus, a failure to simultaneously update multiple environments may lead to a failure to learn the spatial relationship across environments and to construct larger integrative mental maps. Studies have shown that spatial learning is indeed particularly difficult for the orientation of an interior room relative to the outside world or the relative orientation of different sections of a building, even after years of continuous navigational experience, when spatial updating is required to connect them (Brockmole & Wang, 2002;Moeser, 1988).…”

Issues in the non-visual presentation of graph based diagrams

“…For example, Stevens and Coupe [13] accounted for distortions in spatial judgements by proposing a hierarchical coding of the information. Other studies have provided evidence supporting this model and this is now the dominant view [5].…”