Perspective taking and systematic biases in object location memory

Vladislava Segen,Timothy Slattery,Marios Avraamides,Giorgio Colombo,Jan M Wiener

doi:10.3758/s13414-021-02243-y

Abstract

The aim of the current study was to develop a novel task that allows for the quick assessment of spatial memory precision with minimal technical and training requirements. In this task, participants memorized the position of an object in a virtual room and then judged from a different perspective, whether the object has moved to the left or to the right. Results revealed that participants exhibited a systematic bias in their responses that we termed the reversed congruency effect. Specifically, they performed worse when the camera and the object moved in the same direction than when they moved in opposite directions. Notably, participants responded correctly in almost 100% of the incongruent trials, regardless of the distance by which the object was displaced. In Experiment 2, we showed that this effect cannot be explained by the movement of the object on the screen, but that it relates to the perspective shift and the movement of the object in the virtual world. We also showed that the presence of additional objects in the environment reduces the reversed congruency effect such that it no longer predicts performance. In Experiment 3, we showed that the reversed congruency effect is greater in older adults, suggesting that the quality of spatial memory and perspective-taking abilities are critical. Overall, our results suggest that this effect is driven by difficulties in the precise encoding of object locations in the environment and in understanding how perspective shifts affect the projected positions of the objects in the two-dimensional image.

Highlights

In this experiment, we introduce a novel task that was designed to provide a quick assessment of the precision of object location representations in healthy younger adults
We found an interaction between camera direction and object direction, with lower performance in situations when the camera and the object moved in the same direction
If the object and the camera moved in the same direction, participants perceived the movement of the object to be in the opposite direction

Summary

Introduction

We introduce a novel task that was designed to provide a quick assessment of the precision of object location representations in healthy younger adults. We employed psychophysics methods using an 2AFC task in which participants had to judge the direction in which an object moved in an environment following a perspective shift. A 2AFC approach was chosen as it is better suited to rapidly and reliably assess precision of spatial memory than change detection tasks (Heywood-Everett et al, 2020). To investigate the precision of participants’ representations for object locations, we systematically manipulated the distance by which the object was displaced

Objectives

Results

Conclusion