The Influence of Position on Spatial Representation in Working Memory

Abstract

Recall and imagery of familiar, distant places occurs in a specific orientation which has been shown to be biased towards the airline direction from the location where recall occurs to the target[11]. This effect has implications for the interaction of different types of spatial representations, such as egocentric working memory and allocentric long-term memory. Here we address the following questions: (i) Does the effect scale with the distance between recall location and target in a continuous way? (ii) Does the effect that was originally demonstrated with sketch maps also occur in a reconstruction task with landmark models? (iii) Does the effect also occur in virtual environments? Results show that hypotheses (ii) and (iii) can be confirmed while more work is needed for hypothesis (i).