Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, 1503 E. University Blvd., Tucson, AZ, 85721, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, 1503 E. University Blvd., Tucson, AZ, 85721, USA; Evelyn McKnight Brain Institute, University of Arizona, 1503 E. University Blvd., Tucson, AZ, 85721, USA; Cognitive Science Program, University of Arizona, 1503 E. University Blvd., Tucson, AZ, 85721, USA.
Neuropsychologia. 2023 Jun 6;184:108565. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2023.108565. Epub 2023 Apr 18.
Navigation is instrumental to daily life and is often used to encode and locate objects, such as keys in one's house. Yet, little is known about how navigation works in more ecologically valid situations such as finding objects within a room. Specifically, it is not clear how vision vs. body movements contribute differentially to spatial memory in such small-scale spaces. In the current study, participants encoded object locations by viewing them while standing (stationary condition) or by additionally being guided by the experimenter while blindfolded (walking condition) after viewing the objects. They then retrieved the objects from the same or different viewpoint, creating a 2 × 2 within subject design. We simultaneously recorded participant eye movements throughout the experiment using mobile eye tracking. The results showed no statistically significant differences among our four conditions (stationary, same viewpoint as encoding; stationary, different viewpoint; walking, same viewpoint; walking, different viewpoint), suggesting that in a small real-world space, vision may be sufficient to remember object locations. Eye tracking analyses revealed that object locations were better remembered next to landmarks and that participants encoded items on one wall together, suggesting the use of local wall coordinates rather than global room coordinates. A multivariate regression analysis revealed that the only significant predictor of object placement accuracy was average looking time. These results suggest that vision may be sufficient for encoding object locations in a small-scale environment and that such memories may be formed largely locally rather than globally.
导航对于日常生活至关重要，通常用于对物体进行编码和定位，例如在自己家中定位钥匙。然而，对于导航在更符合生态条件的情况下如何工作，例如在房间内寻找物体，人们知之甚少。具体来说，不清楚视觉与身体运动在这种小尺度空间中对空间记忆的贡献有何不同。在当前的研究中，参与者通过站立观看（静止条件）或在观看物体后蒙上眼睛由实验者引导（行走条件）来对物体位置进行编码。然后，他们从相同或不同的视角检索物体，形成了 2×2 的被试内设计。我们在整个实验过程中使用移动眼动追踪技术同时记录参与者的眼动。结果表明，我们的四个条件（静止，与编码时相同的视角；静止，不同的视角；行走，相同的视角；行走，不同的视角）之间没有统计学上的显著差异，这表明在一个小的真实空间中，视觉可能足以记住物体的位置。眼动追踪分析表明，物体位置在靠近地标时更容易被记住，参与者将同一面墙上的物品一起编码，这表明使用了局部墙壁坐标而不是全局房间坐标。多元回归分析表明，唯一显著预测物体放置准确性的因素是平均注视时间。这些结果表明，在小尺度环境中，视觉可能足以对物体位置进行编码，并且这种记忆可能主要是局部形成的，而不是全局形成的。
