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Switching between environmental representations in memory.

James R Brockmole1, Ranxiao Frances Wang

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 603 E. Daniel Street, Champaign, IL 61820, USA. jbrockmo@s.psych.uiuc.edu

Cognition
|April 6, 2002
PubMed
Summary

People access mental representations of environments sequentially, not simultaneously. This study used a cued task-set switching paradigm to investigate how we navigate and recall spatial information from different environments.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Spatial Cognition

Background:

  • Everyday tasks rely on storing and accessing mental representations of environments not currently perceived.
  • Previous research proposed that environmental representations are organized independently in memory.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether multiple environmental representations can be accessed simultaneously.
  • To test the hypothesis of independent environmental representations in memory.

Main Methods:

  • Employed a cued task-set switching paradigm.
  • Participants judged spatial relationships between target locations in two familiar environments.
  • Response times were measured for successive trials probing different environments.

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Main Results:

  • Response times were significantly longer when successive trials involved different environments.
  • This effect was not attributable to switching between semantic categories or semantic priming.
  • Findings suggest sequential access of environmental representations.

Conclusions:

  • Mental representations of environments are accessed sequentially, not in parallel.
  • This sequential access has implications for theories of environmental representation and memory organization.