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The Spatial Memory Game: Testing the Relationship Between Spatial Language, Object Knowledge, and Spatial Cognition
Published on: February 19, 2018
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Location has a privilege, but it is limited: Evidence from probing task-irrelevant location
1Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University.
Summary
Location and orientation encoding in visual working memory (VWM) are not fully automatic. While location encoding is more automatic than orientation, neither process occurs without attention, impacting memory precision.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Visual Perception
Background:
- Visual working memory (VWM) is crucial for cognitive tasks.
- Understanding the automaticity of encoding processes in VWM is essential for explaining memory limitations.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the automaticity of location and orientation encoding in VWM.
- To determine the resource demands of incidental encoding for spatial and feature information.
Main Methods:
- Five experiments manipulated the task relevance of color, location, and orientation.
- Surprise report trials assessed memory for incidentally encoded information.
- Control trials measured memory for task-relevant information to quantify costs.
Main Results:
- Performance on surprise location and orientation trials was significantly worse than on control trials.
- Orientation encoding showed greater deficits, with minimal measurable information recalled.
- Incidental location encoding resulted in coarse-grained representations, limiting spatial precision.
Conclusions:
- Neither location nor orientation encoding in VWM is fully automatic.
- Location encoding is more automatic than orientation encoding.
- Incidental spatial encoding has limitations that affect the precision of memory representations.
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