Reinstating location improves mnemonic access but not fidelity of visual mental representations

In a virtual reality environment combined with a continuous delayed estimation paradigm, we investigated how manipulation of location at recall (i.e., corresponding vs. non-corresponding to the location where the object was previously encoded) affected mnemonic access and mnemonic fidelity of color information in 100 participants with a within-subjects design. We predicted that the reinstatement of location during recall would improve mnemonic access and mnemonic fidelity. The results suggest that congruent location enhances color access. However, congruent location seems to play no role, or a small role not yet identified in enhancing the details of visual mental representations (weak evidence for the null hypothesis). Explorative analyses revealed that self-reported object imagery preferences modulate the effect of location manipulation on mnemonic access. Overall, the results support the conceptualization of spatial information as a basic feature to help access visual mental representations. Taken together, these findings are in line with the scaffolding hypothesis of visual mental imagery.