The effects of sensorimotor cues on spatial reasoning performance

Abstract

A typical result in the spatial updating and the perspective-taking literature is that performance suffers when a target needs to be localized from a perspective which is misaligned with the actual perspective of the participant. In spatial updating studies, this result has been traditionally attributed to the lack of vestibular and proprioceptive cues during the imagined movement which is required to adopt the imagined perspective. In perspective-taking studies inferior performance is often assumed to result from the construction of viewpointspecific memories. The fact that the vast majority of these studies have used pointing as the response mode creates the possibility that the inferior performance from imagined perspectives is inherent to the response modality itself. Pointing is by definition strongly dependent on one’s physical body and this may create difficulties when the task entails using pointing from a perspective other than that of the physical body. Results from several experiments will be reported in support of this hypothesis.