Abstract
Establishing verbal memory traces for non-verbal stimuli was reported to facilitate or inhibit memory for the non-verbal stimuli. We show that these effects are also observed in a domain not indicated before—wayfinding. Fifty-three participants followed a guided route in a virtual environment. They were asked to remember half of the intersections by relying on the visual impression only. At the other 50% of the intersections, participants additionally heard a place name, which they were asked to memorize. For testing, participants were teleported to the intersections and were asked to indicate the subsequent direction of the learned route. In Experiment 1, intersections' names were arbitrary (i.e., not related to the visual impression). Here, participants performed more accurately at unnamed intersections. In Experiment 2, intersections' names were descriptive and participants' route memory was more accurate at named intersections. Results have implications for naming places in a city and for wayfinding aids.
Highlights
While verbal and non-verbal memory is involved in spatial learning, it is currently unknown how they interact during learning
Results from Experiment 1 showed that learning arbitrary location labels interfered with route learning
In Experiment 2, we used descriptive labels. These descriptive labels were thought to connect the memory for an intersection and a label and enhance route learning
Summary
Spatial information from a visible environment is processed (visuo)spatially, and verbally: learning an environment while concurrently conducting a verbal secondary task was shown to influence performance in learning routes from video (Meilinger et al, 2008; Wen et al, 2011, 2012), from walking (Garden et al, 2002; Labate et al, 2014), from a map (Garden et al, 2002), as well as learning object locations in a room (Meilinger and Bülthoff, 2013). Dual coding states that verbal and non-verbal items are memorized in two separate, but corresponding memory systems. A route walked may be memorized in a (visuo)spatial code which is translated into a verbal route description. Both memory traces may be used for retrieval, and enhance retrieval performance. Such advantages have been repeatedly shown, for example, in verbal recall of single items (Paivio and Csapo, 1973), as well as for verbalizations in recognition of faces (Brown and Lloyd-Jones, 2005, 2006), drawings
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