Egocentric and nonegocentric coding in memory for spatial layout: evidence from scene recognition
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Updated: Jul 20, 2026

The (Spatial) Memory Game: Testing the Relationship Between Spatial Language, Object Knowledge, and Spatial Cognition
Published on: February 19, 2018
1Department of Psychology, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056, USA. wallerda@muohio.edu
Abstract:
Much contemporary research has suggested that memories for spatial layout are stored with a preferred orientation. The present research examined whether spatial memories are also stored with a preferred viewpoint position. Participants viewed images of an arrangement of objects taken from a single viewpoint and subsequently were tested on their ability to recognize the arrangement from novel viewpoints that had been translated in either the lateral or the depth dimension. Lateral and forward displacements of the viewpoint resulted in increasing response latencies and errors. Backward displacement showed no such effect, nor did lateral translation that resulted in a centered "canonical" view of the arrangement. These results further constrain the specificity of spatial memory, while also providing some evidence that nonegocentric spatial information is coded in memory.
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