Environmental influences on spatial memory: A study with Space Syntax (original) (raw)
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Spatial memory for highly familiar environments
2009
In this experiment we examined orientation dependency in human memory for a highly familiar environmental space. Twenty-seven inhabitants living for at least two years in Tübingen saw a photorealistic virtual model of the city center (Virtual Tübingen) through a head-mounted display. They were teleported to five different initial locations in Virtual Tübingen and asked to point towards well-known target locations. This procedure was repeated in twelve different body-orientations for each of the initial locations. Participants pointed more accurately when oriented northwards regardless of the initial location. We also found a small effect of local orientation. The more participants were aligned with the street leading to the target location the better was their pointing performance. Even though the strong alignment effect with a global orientation is predicted by reference direction theory, this theory does not predict that this global orientation is, first, common for almost all participants, and second, that this orientation is north. We discuss our results with respect to well-known theories of spatial memory and speculate that the bias we find for north orientation is due to participants relying on memory of a city map of Tübingen for their pointing response.
Spatial memory in the real world: long-term representations of everyday environments
2011
When people learn an environment, they appear to establish a principle orientation just as they would determine the "top" of a novel object. Evidence for reference orientations has largely come from observations of orientation dependence in pointing judgments: Participants are most accurate when asked to recall the space from a particular orientation. However, these investigations have used highly constrained encoding in both timescale and navigational goals, leaving open the possibility that larger spaces experienced during navigational learning depend on a different organizational scheme. To test this possibility, we asked undergraduates to perform judgments of relative direction on familiar landmarks around their well-learned campus. Participants showed clear evidence for a single reference orientation, generally aligned along salient axes defined by the buildings and paths. This result argues that representing space involves the establishment of a reference orientation, a requirement that endures over repeated exposures and extensive experience.
A Spatial-Context Effect in Recognition Memory
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
We designed a novel experiment to investigate the modulation of human recognition memory by environmental context. Human participants were asked to navigate through a four-arm Virtual Reality (VR) maze in order to find and memorize discrete items presented at specific locations in the environment. They were later on tested on their ability to recognize items as previously presented or new. By manipulating the spatial position of half of the studied items during the testing phase of our experiment, we could assess differences in performance related to the congruency of environmental information at encoding and retrieval. Our results revealed that spatial context had a significant effect on the quality of memory. In particular, we found that recognition performance was significantly better in trials in which contextual information was congruent as opposed to those in which it was different. Our results are in line with previous studies that have reported spatial-context effects in recognition memory, further characterizing their magnitude under ecologically valid experimental conditions.
Advances in Cognitive Psychology, 2015
navigation and spatial memory, spatial cognition, representation Few studies have explored how humans memorize landmarks in complex multifloored buildings. they have observed that participants memorize an environment either by floors or by vertical columns, influenced by the learning path. however, the influence of the building's actual structure is not yet known. in order to investigate this influence, we conducted an experiment using an object-in-place protocol in a cylindrical building to contrast with previous experiments which used rectilinear environments. two groups of 15 participants were taken on a tour with a first person perspective through a virtual cylindrical three-floored building. they followed either a route discovering floors one at a time, or a route discovering columns (by simulated lifts across floors). they then underwent a series of trials, in which they viewed a camera movement reproducing either a segment of the learning path (familiar trials), or performing a shortcut relative to the learning trajectory (novel trials). We observed that regardless of the learning path, participants better memorized the building by floors, and only participants who had discovered the building by columns also memorized it by columns. this expands on previous results obtained in a rectilinear building, where the learning path favoured the memory of its horizontal and vertical layout. taken together, these results suggest that both learning mode and an environment's structure influence the spatial memory of complex multifloored buildings. corresponding author: laurent dollé, ceA tech, technocampus océan 5, rue de l'halbrane,
Remembering Places in Space: A Human Analog Study of the Morris Water Maze
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007
We conducted a human analog study of the Morris Water Maze, with individuals indicating a remembered location in a 3 m diameter arena over different intervals of time and with different memory loads. The primary focus of the study was to test a theory of how varying cue location and number of cues affects memory for spatial location. As expected, memory performance as measured by proximity to the actual location was negatively affected by increasing memory load and delay interval and decreasing number of cues. As memory performance decremented, bias effects increased and were in accordance with the cue-based memory model described by . Specifically, remembered locations were biased toward the nearest cue and error decreased with more cues. These results demonstrate that localization processes that apply to small two-dimensional task fields may generalize to a larger traversable task field.
Systems of spatial reference in human memory
2001
Seven experiments examined the spatial reference systems used in memory to represent the locations of objects in the environment. Participants learned the locations of common objects in a room and then made judgments of relative direction using their memories of the layout (e.g., ''Imagine you are standing at the shoe, facing the lamp; point to the clock''). The experiments manipulated the number of views that observers were allowed to experience, the presence or absence of local and global reference systems (e.g., a rectangular mat on which objects were placed and the walls of the room, respectively), and the congruence of local and global reference systems. Judgments of relative direction were more accurate for imagined headings parallel to study views than for imagined headings parallel to novel views, even with up to three study views. However, study views misaligned with salient reference systems in the environment were not strongly represented if they were experienced in the context of aligned views. Novel views aligned with a local reference system were, under certain conditions, easier to imagine than were novel views misaligned with the local reference system. We propose that learning and remembering the spatial structure of the surrounding environment involves interpreting the layout in terms of a spatial reference system. This reference system is imposed on the environment but defined by egocentric experience.
Cue Effects on Memory for Location When Navigating Spatial Displays
Cognitive Science, 2009
Participants maneuvered a rat image through a circular region on the computer screen to find a hidden target platform, blending aspects of two well-known spatial tasks. Like the Morris water maze task, participants first experienced a series of learning trials before having to navigate to the hidden target platform from different locations and orientations. Like the dot-location task, they determined the location of a position within a two-dimensional circular region. This procedure provided a way to examine how the number of surrounding cues (1, 2, or 3) affects the memory for spatial location in navigation. Memory performance was better when there were more cues and when targets were close to cues, consistent with the idea that cues bolster fine-grain memory, especially in proximal regions. Early and late measures of bias in memory reflected biases in a direction toward the nearest cue, implicating a cue-based category structure of the navigational space. Collectively, results suggest cue-based spatial memory representations that have been inferred from the dot-location task generalize to a navigation task within a simple, computer-based environment, as demonstrated by the good fits of the spatial model developed for the dot-location task .