Blacker Kara J, Weisberg Steven M, Newcombe Nora S, Courtney Susan M
Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, The Johns Hopkins University.
Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and Department of Neurology, University of Pennsylvania.
Vis cogn. 2017;25(7-8):691-702. doi: 10.1080/13506285.2017.1322652. Epub 2017 Jun 12.
Spatial working memory (WM) seems to include two types of spatial information, locations and relations. However, this distinction has been based on small-scale tasks. Here, we used a virtual navigation paradigm to examine whether WM for locations and relations applies to the large-scale spatial world. We found that navigators who successfully learned two routes and also integrated them were superior at maintaining multiple locations and multiple relations in WM. However, over the entire spectrum of navigators, WM for spatial relations, but not locations, was specifically predictive of route integration performance. These results lend further support to the distinction between these two forms of spatial WM and point to their critical role in individual differences in navigation proficiency.
空间工作记忆（WM）似乎包含两种空间信息，即位置和关系。然而，这种区分是基于小规模任务得出的。在此，我们采用虚拟导航范式来检验位置和关系的工作记忆是否适用于大规模空间世界。我们发现，成功学习两条路线并将它们整合起来的导航者在工作记忆中保持多个位置和多种关系方面表现更出色。然而，在整个导航者群体中，空间关系的工作记忆而非位置的工作记忆，能特别预测路线整合表现。这些结果进一步支持了这两种空间工作记忆形式之间的区分，并指出它们在导航熟练度个体差异中的关键作用。
