Transient and Enduring Spatial Representations under Disorientation and Self-Rotation

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition Vol. 32; no. 4; pp. 867 - 882
• Main Authors: Waller, David, Hodgson, Eric
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Psychological Association 01.07.2006
• Subjects: Adult; Cognitive Processes; Context Effect; Discrimination (Psychology); Female; Humans; Kinesthesis; Male; Mental Recall; Orientation; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Performance Factors; Physical Environment; Problem Solving; Psychological Studies; Psychomotor Performance; Social Environment; Space Perception; Spatial Ability; Thinking Skills; Time; Visual Perception
• ISSN: 0278-7393
• DOI: 10.1037/0278-7393.32.4.867

Current theories of environmental cognition typically differentiate between an online, transient, and dynamic system of spatial representation and an offline and enduring system of memory representation. Here the authors present additional evidence for such 2-system theories in the context of the disorientation paradigm introduced by R. F. Wang and E. S. Spelke (2000). Several experiments replicate the finding that disorientation results in a decrease in the precision of people's estimates of relative directions. In contrast to the typical interpretation of this effect as indicating the primacy of a transient spatial system, the present results are generally more consistent with an interpretation of it as indicating a switch from a relatively precise online representation to a relatively coarse enduring one. Further experiments examine the relative precision of transient and enduring representations and show that switching between them does not require disorientation, but can also be produced by self-rotations as small as 135 degrees.