Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany.
Psychol Sci. 2012 Feb;23(2):120-5. doi: 10.1177/0956797611429467. Epub 2011 Dec 29.
We examined how a highly familiar environmental space--one's city of residence--is represented in memory. Twenty-six participants faced a photo-realistic virtual model of their hometown and completed a task in which they pointed to familiar target locations from various orientations. Each participant's performance was most accurate when he or she was facing north, and errors increased as participants' deviation from a north-facing orientation increased. Pointing errors and latencies were not related to the distance between participants' initial locations and the target locations. Our results are inconsistent with accounts of orientation-free memory and with theories assuming that the storage of spatial knowledge depends on local reference frames. Although participants recognized familiar local views in their initial locations, their strategy for pointing relied on a single, north-oriented reference frame that was likely acquired from maps rather than experience from daily exploration. Even though participants had spent significantly more time navigating the city than looking at maps, their pointing behavior seemed to rely on a north-oriented mental map.
我们研究了人们是如何在记忆中表现出一个非常熟悉的环境空间——他们居住的城市。26 名参与者面对他们家乡的逼真虚拟模型，并完成了一项任务，即从不同方向指向熟悉的目标位置。当参与者面向北方时，他们的表现最为准确，而当他们偏离面向北方的方向时，错误会增加。指向错误和延迟与参与者初始位置和目标位置之间的距离无关。我们的结果与无方向记忆的解释以及假设空间知识存储依赖于局部参考系的理论不一致。尽管参与者在初始位置识别出熟悉的本地视图，但他们的指向策略依赖于一个可能是从地图上而不是从日常探索中获得的单一、面向北方的参考系。尽管参与者花了更多的时间在城市中导航，而不是看地图，但他们的指向行为似乎依赖于面向北方的心理地图。
