Abstracts 2005 - The Psychonomic Society

Posters 1001–1007 Thursday Evening
POSTER SESSION I
Sheraton Hall, Thursday Evening, 6:00–7:30
• SPATIAL COGNITION •
(1001)
The Contributions of Ordinal Structure and Visual Landmarks to
Navigation. HUIYING ZHONG, MARIANNE C. HARRISON, &
WILLIAM H. WARREN, Brown University—We compare the contributions
of ordinal structure and visual landmarks to navigation when
walking in an immersive virtual hedge maze. The maze contains a set
of places and paths with distinctive landmarks at some junctions. Participants
first freely explore and then walk from a home location to
specified places; on probe trials, the maze is manipulated. In Experiment
1, the path layout remains constant while landmarks are shifted
along the main corridor or rotated around a radial-arm section. In Experiment
2, paths are added to or subtracted from the maze, while
landmark positions remain constant. Participants relied heavily on the
ordinal structure of paths in the first experiment. In the second experiment,
we determined whether they would continue to do so when
landmark positions were more reliable. The results suggest a dependence
on spatial knowledge of the ordinal structure of paths and
places over visual landmarks in active navigation.
(1002)
Influence of Environmental Axes on Spatial Memories Acquired
Through Language. CHIARA MENEGHETTI, University of Padua,
JULIA SLUZENSKI & BJOERN RUMP, Vanderbilt University, JEN-
NIFER LABRECQUE, Duke University, & TIMOTHY P. MCNA-
MARA, Vanderbilt University—Prior research has demonstrated the
influence of salient environmental axes on spatial memory learned
from vision (Shelton & McNamara, 2001). We examined this influence
on spatial memory acquired through language. In Experiment 1,
participants learned object locations by reading a route text describing
a path through a baseball field. The imagined path was either
aligned or misaligned with the axis through home plate and the
pitcher’s mound. Participants remembered object locations best when
they imagined standing with the same heading as in the text. In Experiment
2, participants learned both the aligned and the misaligned
texts. Participants who first learned the aligned text remembered this
heading better than novel headings, whereas those who first learned
the misaligned text remembered all headings equally well. These findings
suggest that salient axes have less of an influence on spatial memory
learned from language than on spatial memory learned through
vision.
(1003)
Roles of Layout Geometry and Viewing Perspectives in the Selection
of Intrinsic Frames of Reference in Spatial Memory. WEIMIN MOU
& MINTAO ZHAO, Chinese Academy of Sciences, & TIMOTHY P.
MCNAMARA, Vanderbilt University (sponsored by Weimin Mou)—
Four experiments investigated the roles of layout geometry and viewing
perspectives in the selection of intrinsic frames of reference in
spatial memory. Participants learned the locations of objects in a room
from two or three viewing perspectives. One view corresponded to the
axis of bilateral symmetry of the layout. Judgments of relative direction
using spatial memory were quicker for imagined headings parallel
to the symmetric axis than for those parallel to the other viewing
perspectives. This advantage disappeared when the symmetric axis
was removed. Judgments of relative direction were not equally fast for
the two oblique experienced headings. These results indicate that layout
geometry affects the selection of intrinsic frames of reference and
that two oblique intrinsic directions cannot be selected simultaneously.
(1004)
Spatial Memory of Briefly Viewing a Desktop Scene. WEIMIN
MOU & CHENGLI XIAO, Chinese Academy of Sciences, & TIMO-
52
THY P. MCNAMARA, Vanderbilt University—Two experiments investigated
participants’ spatial memory and spatial updating after they
briefly viewed a scene. Participants in a darkroom saw an array of five
phosphorescent objects on a table and, after a short delay, indicated
whether a probed object had been moved. Participants made their
judgment from the original or from a new viewing perspective. In one
condition, the objects other than the probed one moved (different spatial
context), and in the other condition the other objects stayed untouched
(same spatial context). Performance was better in the samecontext
than in the different-context condition, and better when the
testing perspective was the same as the viewing perspective than when
it was different. These findings indicated that interobject spatial relations
were mentally represented in terms of an intrinsic frame of reference
and that the orientation of the intrinsic frame of reference was
not changed during locomotion.
(1005)
Failure to Integrate Spatial Information in a Virtual Environment
Foraging Task. BRADLEY R. STURZ, KENT D. BODILY, JEF-
FREY S. KATZ, & LEWIS M. BARKER, Auburn University—A 3-D
virtual environment was constructed for humans as an open-field analogue
of Blaisdell and Cook’s (2005) pigeon foraging task to determine
whether humans, like pigeons, were capable of integrating separate
spatial maps. Subjects searched a virtual environment for a goal
located in a 4 � 4 grid of raised cups. In Phase 1 training, subjects
learned to locate the goal between two landmarks (Map 1: blue T, red
L) and in Phase 2 training, down and left of a single landmark (Map 2:
blue T ). During testing, subjects were required to make nonreinforced
choices in the presence of the red L alone. Cup choices during testing assessed
subjects’ strategies: generalization (Map 2), association (Map 1),
or integration (combination of Maps 1 and 2). Results suggested that
subjects used a single landmark generalization strategy, which was
confirmed by control groups. Comparative implications of the results
are discussed.
(1006)
Formulating Spatial Descriptions in Scenes With Multiple Objects.
PATRICK L. HILL & LAURA A. CARLSON, University of Notre
Dame—In order to describe the location of a target, a speaker may
specify its spatial relation with respect to a reference object. This requires
selecting an “easy-to-find” reference object and an “easy-tocompute”
spatial term. However, given a display with numerous objects
and spatial relations, it is not clear how such selection occurs.
First, speakers could initially select the most appropriate reference object,
with this selection constraining the spatial term that is subsequently
selected. Second, speakers could select the most appropriate
spatial term, with this selection constraining the reference object that
is subsequently selected. Third, speakers could jointly consider and
select from object–term pairs. Using rating and production tasks in
which we manipulate attributes of the objects and their spatial relations,
we demonstrate that speakers are influenced by both the appropriateness
of the objects and the appropriateness of the spatial term,
supporting the idea that these are jointly considered.
(1007)
What’s Up? Reference Frames and Spatial Transformations. BYUNG
CHUL YOON & AMY L. SHELTON, Johns Hopkins University—
Object-based and perspective transformations of bodies/objects are
characterized by different temporal properties (Zacks & Michelon, in
press): object-based transformations show a linear relationship between
the angular disparity of two figures and response latency,
whereas perspective transformations show greater orientation invariance.
However, for room stimuli, a perspective transformation task has
shown an attenuated linear relationship with response latency, suggesting
that participants may automatically reconcile the scene with
their upright position. We investigated this interpretation by disrupting
the congruence among the gravitational, local, and egocentric reference
frames and asking which frame defines “upright” for room