Differences in adults' spatial scaling based on visual or haptic information.

Magdalena Szubielska,Marta Szewczyk,Wenke Möhring

doi:10.1007/s10339-021-01071-0

Abstract

The present study examined differences in adults’ spatial-scaling abilities across three perceptual conditions: (1) visual, (2) haptic, and (3) visual and haptic. Participants were instructed to encode the position of a convex target presented in a simple map without a time limit. Immediately after encoding the map, participants were presented with a referent space and asked to place a disc at the same location from memory. All spaces were designed as tactile graphics. Positions of targets varied along the horizontal dimension. The referent space was constant in size while sizes of maps were systematically varied, resulting in three scaling factor conditions: 1:4, 1:2, 1:1. Sixty adults participated in the study (M = 21.18; SD = 1.05). One-third of them was blindfolded throughout the entire experiment (haptic condition). The second group of participants was allowed to see the graphics (visual condition); the third group were instructed to see and touch the graphics (bimodal condition). An analysis of participants’ absolute errors showed that participants produced larger errors in the haptic condition as opposed to the visual and bimodal conditions. There was also a significant interaction effect between scaling factor and perceptual condition. In the visual and bimodal conditions, results showed a linear increase in errors with higher scaling factors (which may suggest that adults adopted mental transformation strategies during the spatial scaling process), whereas, in the haptic condition, this relation was quadratic. Findings imply that adults’ spatial-scaling performance decreases when visual information is not available.

Highlights

Spatial scaling of maps requires a comparison of differentsized spaces and demands an understanding of the connection between these spaces (Frick and Newcombe 2012)
In order to investigate this ability, experimenters usually instruct participants to encode a simple map including a target and ask them to locate a target in an empty space at the same location
Positive values of signed errors indicate that responses were located too far to the right on the referent space; negative values of signed errors demonstrated that responses were located too far to the left

Summary

Introduction

Spatial scaling of maps requires a comparison of differentsized spaces and demands an understanding of the connection between these spaces (Frick and Newcombe 2012). Cognitive Processing usage of mental transformation strategies in adults (and children) Such a strategy was derived from increased errors and response times with higher scaling factors (e.g., Möhring et al 2014, 2016); even though other results exist (e.g., Frick and Newcombe 2012). Spatial scaling of maps was tested in the haptic domain using convex graphics as stimuli (Szubielska et al 2019; Szubielska and Möhring 2019) In these adult studies, it was found that absolute errors increased linearly with higher scaling factors, indicating similar mental transformation strategies. Given that spatial information and maps can be processed in both domains (e.g., Craddock and Lawson 2009a, 2009b; Intraub et al 2015; Klatzky et al 1987; Loomis and Klatzky 2008; Szubielska and Balaj 2018), it seems crucial and timely to fill this gap and to increase our knowledge about spatial scaling of visually and haptically encoded maps

Methods

Results

Conclusion