title: High-level context effects on spatial displacement: the effects of body orientation and language on memory.
abstract: Three decades of research suggests that cognitive simulation of motion is involved in the comprehension of object location, bodily configuration, and linguistic meaning. For example, the remembered location of an object associated with actual or implied motion is typically displaced in the direction of motion. In this paper, two experiments explore context effects in spatial displacement. They provide a novel approach to estimating the remembered location of an implied motion image by employing a cursor-positioning task. Both experiments examine how the remembered spatial location of a person is influenced by subtle differences in implied motion, specifically, by shifting the orientation of the person's body to face upward or downward, and by pairing the image with motion language that differed on intentionality, fell versus jumped. The results of Experiment 1, a survey-based experiment, suggest that language and body orientation influenced vertical spatial displacement. Results of Experiment 2, a task that used Adobe Flash and Amazon Mechanical Turk, showed consistent effects of body orientation on vertical spatial displacement but no effect of language. Our findings are in line with previous work on spatial displacement that uses a cursor-positioning task with implied motion stimuli. We discuss how different ways of simulating motion can influence spatial memory.
authors: Cognitive and Information Sciences, School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, University of California Merced, CA, USA.
authors: David W
authors: DW
authors: Vinson
authors: Cognitive and Information Sciences, School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, University of California Merced, CA, USA.
authors: Drew H
authors: DH
authors: Abney
authors: Cognitive and Information Sciences, School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, University of California Merced, CA, USA.
authors: Rick
authors: R
authors: Dale
authors: Cognitive and Information Sciences, School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, University of California Merced, CA, USA.
authors: Teenie
authors: T
authors: Matlock
keywords: body orientation; language comprehension; motion comprehension; motion simulation; representational momentum; spatial displacement