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Role of Hippocampus in Memory

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 25, 2026

The (Spatial) Memory Game: Testing the Relationship Between Spatial Language, Object Knowledge, and Spatial Cognition
05:15

The (Spatial) Memory Game: Testing the Relationship Between Spatial Language, Object Knowledge, and Spatial Cognition

Published on: February 19, 2018

Retinotopic memory is more precise than spatiotopic memory.

Julie D Golomb1, Nancy Kanwisher

  • 1McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. jgolomb@mit.edu

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
|February 7, 2012
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Memory for locations is surprisingly less accurate in world-centered (spatiotopic) coordinates than eye-centered (retinotopic) coordinates after eye movements. This suggests raw visual memory is more reliable than processed spatial memory.

More Related Videos

Eye Movement Monitoring of Memory
08:06

Eye Movement Monitoring of Memory

Published on: August 15, 2010

Related Experiment Videos

Last Updated: May 25, 2026

The (Spatial) Memory Game: Testing the Relationship Between Spatial Language, Object Knowledge, and Spatial Cognition
05:15

The (Spatial) Memory Game: Testing the Relationship Between Spatial Language, Object Knowledge, and Spatial Cognition

Published on: February 19, 2018

Eye Movement Monitoring of Memory
08:06

Eye Movement Monitoring of Memory

Published on: August 15, 2010

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Neuroscience
  • Visual Perception

Background:

  • Successful visually guided behavior relies on spatiotopic (world-centered) location information.
  • The accuracy of deriving spatiotopic information from initial retinotopic (eye-centered) visual input remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the accuracy and precision of spatial working memory in both retinotopic and spatiotopic coordinates.
  • To determine how eye movements during a memory delay affect the fidelity of retinotopic versus spatiotopic spatial memory.

Main Methods:

  • A spatial working memory task was employed.
  • Subjects remembered cued locations in either spatiotopic or retinotopic coordinates.
  • Guided eye movements (saccades) were performed during the memory delay period.

Main Results:

  • After saccades, subjects showed significantly higher accuracy and precision for retinotopic locations compared to spatiotopic locations.
  • The discrepancy in accuracy increased with each subsequent eye movement.
  • Spatiotopic memory fidelity deteriorated with eye movements, while retinotopic memory showed no accumulated error.

Conclusions:

  • The loss of spatiotopic memory fidelity is a direct consequence of coordinate transformation, not a general effect of eye movements.
  • Despite our perception of a stable world, raw retinotopic memory coordinates are more reliable than processed spatiotopic coordinates.
  • This challenges the assumption that our spatial memory system prioritizes ecologically relevant spatiotopic information over raw retinotopic input.