Processing locational and orientational information

In choice reaction time (RT) tasks, college students verified the truth of displays expressing spatial relations between two objects. The relations werelocational (A is left of B) ororientational (A and B are horizontal). The objects were names of states in the United States, symbols, or letter arrays. The objects were memorized prior to the display (states and letters) or were presented as part of the display (symbols and letters). In the location tasks with both states and symbols, locatives were spatial (right, left, above, below) or compass (north, south, east, west). Distance between states was also varied. When location was judged, horizontally aligned stimuli resulted in slower responses than vertically aligned stimuli, independently of materials and locative set. Reaction time was inversely related to distance. When orientation was judged, responses to horizontal pairs of states were slower than responses to vertical pairs of states, responses to horizontal pairs of letters were faster than responses to vertical pairs, and RT did not depend upon the orientation of symbols. This pattern of results suggests that orientational judgments are influenced by type of materials and the entext to which the material has been encoded (i.e., memorized). Locational judgments reflect a potent source of difficulty not present in orientation tasks, namely, telling left from right. Alternative explanations of the right-left effect are discussed.