Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2024 Apr;31(2):697-707. doi: 10.3758/s13423-023-02366-3. Epub 2023 Sep 5.
Does the mind rely on similar systems of spatial representation for both perception and action? Here, we assessed the format of location representations in two simple spatial localization tasks. In one task, participants simply remembered the location of an item based solely on visual input. In another, participants remembered the location of a point in space based solely on kinesthetic input. Participants' recall errors were more consistent with the use of polar coordinates than Cartesian coordinates in both tasks. Moreover, measures of spatial bias and performance were correlated across modalities. In a subsequent study, we tested the flexibility with which people use polar coordinates to represent space; we show that the format in which the information is presented to participants influences how that information is encoded and the errors that are made as a result. We suggest that polar coordinates may be a common means of representing location information across visual and motor modalities, but that these representations are also flexible in form.
思维是否依赖于类似的空间表示系统来进行感知和行动？在这里，我们评估了两个简单的空间定位任务中位置表示的格式。在一个任务中，参与者仅根据视觉输入来记忆项目的位置。在另一个任务中，参与者仅根据动觉输入来记忆空间中某个点的位置。在这两个任务中，参与者的回忆错误更符合极坐标的使用，而不是笛卡尔坐标的使用。此外，跨模态的空间偏差和性能的度量是相关的。在随后的一项研究中，我们测试了人们使用极坐标来表示空间的灵活性；我们表明，向参与者呈现信息的格式会影响信息的编码方式以及由此产生的错误。我们认为，极坐标可能是在视觉和运动模式之间表示位置信息的通用方式，但这些表示方式在形式上也是灵活的。
