Updating spatial relations to remote locations described in narratives

Abstract

In four experiments we examined whether sensorimotor encoding influences readers' reasoning about spatial scenes acquired through narratives. Participants read a narrative that described the geometry of a store and then pointed to the memorized locations of described objects from imagined perspectives. In Experiment 1, participants walked during learning towards the direction of every described object and then visualized these objects as being in the immediate environment. In Experiment 2 they rotated their body to the direction of the described objects instead of walking to them, while in Experiment 3 they only turned their heads towards the objects. In Experiment 4, we eliminated the instructions to visualize the objects altogether. Results from the first three experiments revealed a performance benefit for responding from the perspective that participants physically occupied at testing. However, results from Experiment 4 showed that only participants who, in a post-task questionnaire, indicated that they had linked the described environment to their immediate environment exhibited such a benefit. Findings indicate that (1) the physical change in orientation influences reasoning about described environments if the remote environments are linked to participants' sensorimotor framework and, (2) visualization instructions are sufficient to produce such a link.

The Road More Travelled: The Differential Effects of Spatial Experience in Young and Elderly Participants

“…Moreover, the method of separating coordinate and categorical components in an integrated external representation of spatial information is useful for independently decoding position and distance. Especially in aging research, knowing the trajectories of categorical and coordinate spatial relations, the building blocks of spatial mental representations, can help the researcher better understand the online processing of navigation and offline spatial reasoning, and the functioning of their neural correlates (e.g., [ 122 , 123 ]).…”

The impact of age and familiarity with the environment on categorical and coordinate spatial relation representations

“…From a neural perspective, visuo‐spatial information acquired and stored in memory is integrated in motoric actions via the dorsal stream (running from the primary visual area to posterior parietal cortex (e.g., Snyder, Batista, & Andersen, 1997). More specifically, the somatosensory system stores proprioceptive information which is then integrated with vestibular information to compute distances (e.g., Barlow, 1964; Hatzipanayioti, Galati, & Avraamides, 2016). Thus, it is plausible to infer that the regular experience within the hometown, protects individuals from getting lost and disorientation (e.g., Golledge, 2002), also via the improvement of coordinate relation processing.…”

“…By contrast, an advantage for categorical information emerged in the case of own country and Northern Europe tasks. This kind of information is organized around allocentric reference frames (e.g., Hatzipanayioti et al, 2016). It is more likely that there are will not be regular updates to this kind of spatial information.…”

Signatures of cognitive difficulty in perspective-taking: is the egocentric perspective always the easiest to adopt?

“…For example, individuals' performance can exhibit either sensorimotor facilitation or interference, depending on the alignment between their physical orientation in space and their imagined perspective (May, 2004). Similarly, the congruence between people's physical orientation in their immediate environment and their imagined perspective, as when reading about a protagonist moving in a described environment, influences the ease with which they make judgments about locations in the described environment (Hatzipanayioti, Galati, & Avraamides, 2016a, 2016b. These findings motivate the prediction that dissociating the egocentric and sensorimotor perspectives would influence the ease of adopting the egocentric perspective, and by extension perhaps make the selection of that perspective less likely.…”