A computational cognitive model of judgments of relative direction

In the past several decades, considerable theoretical progress has been made in understanding the role of reference frames in the encoding and retrieval of spatial information about the environment. Many of these insights have come from participants making judgments of relative direction using their memories of spatial layouts. In this task, participants are asked to imagine standing at a given location and facing a certain direction, and to point to a target location. Although this task has been widely and productively used, a computational cognitive model of judgments of relative direction has yet to be introduced. Computational modeling of judgments of relative direction is a critical next step to formulating and testing hypotheses about the cognitive processes involved in establishing and using spatial reference frames. We present an initial attempt to model judgments of relative direction and fit the model to two datasets exhibiting behavioral patterns commonly observed in the spatial memory literature. The model was able to predict many important features of these data, most notably alignment effects. We discuss directions for future modeling efforts.