Different mental representations for place recognition and goal localization.
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. Participants in the present experiment learned the locations of seven objects within a room from two views, and were then tested in a separate room using scene recognition and judgments of relative direction (JRD). Scene recognition results indicated that two viewer-centered representations of the layout of objects were preserved in long-term memory, whereas JRD showed evidence of a single orientation-dependent long-term mental representation. The challenges of incorporating the present findings into existing theories of human spatial memory are discussed.
Valiquette
Christine
C
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee 37203, USA.
McNamara
Timoth P
TP
D003071:Cognition; D006040:Goals; D006801:Humans; D011930:Reaction Time; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D013028:Space Perception