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Published on: February 19, 2018
Updating space during imagined self- and array translations
1Department of Psychology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112-0251, USA. sarah.creem@psych.utah.edu
Abstract:
Previous work has demonstrated superior spatial updating performance during imagined viewer rotation versus imagined object/array rotation. Studies have also suggested that rotations are more difficult to process than translations. In three studies, we examined whether the advantage seen for updating during imagined self-rotations would generalize to translations. The participants updated the positions of objects in a line extending either to the front and back of the viewer or to the right and left after imagining viewer or array translation. Experiments 1 and 2 replicated the effects seen in imagined rotation tasks. A response time and accuracy advantage was found for imagined viewer translation versus imagined array translation. In Experiment 3, we directly compared real and imagined self- and array translations and demonstrated an advantage for real versus imagined array translation. The results suggest that the advantage for imagined viewer transformations is not a function of the specific transformation, but rather of the ability to imagine and predict the outcome of a moving frame of reference.
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