title: Updating space during imagined self- and array translations.
abstract: Previous work has demonstrated superior spatial updating performance during imagined viewer rotation versus imagined object/array rotation. Studies have also suggested that rotations are more difficult to process than translations. In three studies, we examined whether the advantage seen for updating during imagined self-rotations would generalize to translations. The participants updated the positions of objects in a line extending either to the front and back of the viewer or to the right and left after imagining viewer or array translation. Experiments 1 and 2 replicated the effects seen in imagined rotation tasks. A response time and accuracy advantage was found for imagined viewer translation versus imagined array translation. In Experiment 3, we directly compared real and imagined self- and array translations and demonstrated an advantage for real versus imagined array translation. The results suggest that the advantage for imagined viewer transformations is not a function of the specific transformation, but rather of the ability to imagine and predict the outcome of a moving frame of reference.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112-0251, USA. sarah.creem@psych.utah.edu
authors.forename: Sarah H
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Creem-Regehr
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination; D011930:Reaction Time; D013028:Space Perception; D014796:Visual Perception