Egocentric updating of remote locations

Abstract

The study examined whether people update remote spatial locations in unfamiliar environments during physical movement. Participants learned a layout of objects from one perspective and carried out perspective-taking trials after physically rotating to a new perspective in either the same room as learning or in an adjacent room. Prior to rotation in the adjacent room participants were instructed to visualize the objects as being around them. Responses to perspective-taking trials involved either pointing or verbal labeling. In both testing environments, participants pointed more efficiently from imagined perspectives aligned with either the initial learning perspective or their current facing orientation than from a novel imagined perspective; this indicates that they had updated the encoded spatial relations during the physical rotation and treated remote objects as immediate. Differences in performance among perspectives were less pronounced for verbal labeling in both environments, suggesting that this response mode is more flexibly used from imagined perspectives. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.