Recognition memory for sentences from spatial descriptions: a test of the episodic construction trace hypothesis

Many researchers believe that when people read spatial descriptions, they construct mental models of the configurations described. Payne (1993) proposed that reading a spatial description produces a memory of the operations used to construct a mental model, an episodic construction trace. The episodic construction trace hypothesis predicts that memory for a spatial description will be influenced by the degree of overlap between the construction processes required by the original description and the construction processes prompted by an item in a recognition test. The two experiments reported here show that readers of spatial descriptions are more likely to accept sentences in a recognition test that are consistent with the operations used to construct a mental model than to accept sentences that are inconsistent. Consistency with the episodic construction trace leads to both correct recognition of verbatim sentences from the original description and false recognition of sentences that were not present in the original descriptions.