Determinants of spatial priming in environmental memory

• Published in: Memory & cognition Vol. 19; no. 3; pp. 283 - 292
• Main Authors: Sherman, Richard C., Lim, Kam M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Austin, TX Psychonomic Society 01.05.1991; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Adult; Attention; Biological and medical sciences; Cognition & reasoning; Distance Perception; Experiments; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Learning. Memory; Male; Memory; Mental Recall; Psychology; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reaction Time; Social Environment; Social research; Space Perception; Spatial Behavior; Space; Facilitation; Human; Stimulus localization; Coding; Memory; Cognition; Recall; Mnemonic recognition; Mnemonic retrieval
• ISSN: 0090-502X; 1532-5946
• DOI: 10.3758/BF03211152

Spatial priming in recognizing objects in experimentally learned environments has been proposed as strong evidence for spatial organization of environmental memory. However, in all studies showing recognition priming effects, encoding and rehearsal contiguity may have coincided with spatial proximity, and thus priming may have been due to temporal associations formed during rehearsal, not encoded spatial relations per se. We investigated this question in four experiments, using a trip trial learning method in which temporal contiguity and spatial relations were independent. In Experiment 1, no spatial priming in recognition was found, even though indirect evidence suggested that subjects had encoded spatial relations. In Experiment 2, the trip trial method was compared with the free study procedure commonly used in previous priming studies. Spatial priming occurred only for free study subjects, even though the two groups were equivalent on direct measures of encoding accuracy. In Experiment 3, spatial priming in recognition was obtained with a modification of the trip trial method in which temporal and spatial contiguity were deliberately confounded. In Experiment 4, the unmodified trip trial method produced spatial priming in a location-decision task. Taken together, our results suggest that environmental memory may be spatially organized, but retrieval of object identities does not necessarily activate encoded spatial relations.