Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Psychology, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Lublin, Poland.
Unaffiliated, Lublin, Poland.
Sci Rep. 2023 Sep 6;13(1):14690. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-41533-3.
The current study investigated adults' strategies of spatial scaling from memory in three perceptual conditions (visual, haptic, and visuo-haptic) when scaling up and down. Following previous research, we predicted the usage of mental transformation strategies. In all conditions, participants (N = 90, aged 19-28 years) were presented with tactile, colored graphics which allowed to visually and haptically explore spatial information. Participants were first asked to encode a map including a target. Then, they were instructed to place a response object at the same place on an empty, constant-sized referent space. Maps had five different sizes resulting in five scaling factors (3:1, 2:1, 1:1, 1:2, 1:3). This manipulation also allowed assessing potentially symmetric effects of scaling direction on adults' responses. Response times and absolute errors served as dependent variables. In line with our hypotheses, the changes in these dependent variables were best explained by a quadratic function which suggests the usage of mental transformation strategies for spatial scaling. There were no differences between perceptual conditions concerning the influence of scaling factor on dependent variables. Results revealed symmetric effects of scaling direction on participants' accuracy whereas there were small differences for response times. Our findings highlight the usage of mental transformation strategies in adults' spatial scaling, irrespective of perceptual modality and scaling direction.
本研究在三种知觉条件（视觉、触觉和视触）下考察了成年人在进行大小调整时从记忆中进行空间缩放的策略。根据先前的研究，我们预测了心理转换策略的使用。在所有条件下，参与者（N=90，年龄 19-28 岁）都呈现出触觉彩色图形，使他们能够视觉和触觉探索空间信息。首先，参与者被要求对包含目标的地图进行编码。然后，他们被指示在一个空的、大小不变的参照空间中，将一个响应对象放置在相同的位置上。地图有五个不同的大小，产生五个缩放因子（3:1、2:1、1:1、1:2、1:3）。这种操作还允许评估缩放方向对成年人反应的潜在对称影响。反应时间和绝对误差作为因变量。与我们的假设一致，这些因变量的变化最好由二次函数来解释，这表明在空间缩放中使用了心理转换策略。在依赖变量上，知觉条件之间没有差异。结果表明，在参与者的准确性方面，缩放方向的影响呈对称，而反应时间方面则存在微小差异。我们的发现强调了在成年人的空间缩放中使用心理转换策略，而不论知觉模态和缩放方向如何。
