Does body orientation matter when reasoning about depicted or described scenes?

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to assess whether the orientation of the body at the time of test affects the efficiency with which people reason about spatial relations that are encoded in memory through symbolic media. Experiment 1 used depicted spatial layouts while Experiment 2 used described environments. In contrast to previous studies with directly-experienced spatial layouts, the present experiments revealed no sensorimotor influences on performance. Differences in reasoning about immediate and non-immediate environments are thus discussed. Furthermore, the same patterns of findings (i.e., normal alignment effects) were observed in the two experiments supporting the idea of functional equivalence of spatial representations derived from different modalities