Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2014 Mar;40(2):602-8. doi: 10.1037/a0035279. Epub 2013 Dec 23.
The perspective-taking task is one of the most common paradigms used to study the nature of spatial memory, and better performance for certain orientations is generally interpreted as evidence of spatial representations using these reference directions. However, performance advantages can also result from the relative ease in certain transformations/rotations. To differentiate spatial memory from spatial transformations, the present study took a new approach based on the hypothesis that responses may be biased toward the original representation but not a transformed one. Participants memorized a regular target array and then judged the relative direction between 2 targets while imagining facing various directions. Their response time and absolute errors showed the standard advantages at 4 imagined orientations. In contrast, an attraction analysis suggested that only 1 orientation was represented in memory, whereas performance advantages at other orthogonal orientations were due to lower transformation costs and should not be interpreted as spatial representations. These findings challenged the traditional performance-based interpretations of perspective change tasks and provided a new research paradigm to differentiate spatial representations from spatial transformations.
换位思考任务是研究空间记忆本质最常用的范式之一，对于某些方位表现更好通常被解释为使用这些参考方向的空间表示的证据。然而，某些转换/旋转的相对容易性也可能导致表现优势。为了将空间记忆与空间转换区分开来，本研究基于一种假设提出了一种新方法，即反应可能偏向于原始表示而不是转换表示。参与者记忆一个规则的目标数组，然后在想象面对各种方向的同时判断两个目标之间的相对方向。他们的反应时间和绝对误差在 4 个想象的方向上表现出标准优势。相比之下，吸引力分析表明只有 1 个方向在记忆中被表示，而在其他正交方向上的表现优势是由于转换成本较低，不应被解释为空间表示。这些发现挑战了基于表现的视角变化任务的传统解释，并提供了一种新的研究范式，将空间表示与空间转换区分开来。
