Preparing a Cup of Tea and Writing a Letter: Do Script-Based Actions Influence the Representation of a Real Environment?

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to examine the effects of having people carry out a sequence of actions in an environment on the spatial representation of the environment. The actions were linked by a common theme (e.g., writing a letter). In Experiment 1, the spatial memory test consisted of an implicit and an explicit distance estimation task. Participants who carried out a sequence of script-based actions inside a room showed poor spatial knowledge for this particular room (as compared to a control room or control participants) in disregarding actual distances in their estimations. This deficit could be due to a loss of or to a poorer encoding of spatial information. The results of Experiment 2, however, suggest that the effects observed in Experiment 1 seem to depend on the spatial task used. With a positioning task at testing, we could not find any evidence that could be attributed to an action-based change of a spatial mental representation. In sum, the general hypothesis of action-based influences on mental spatial representations was not corroborated by convincing data.KeywordsSearch TaskSpatial RepresentationDistance EstimationSpatial KnowledgeActual DistanceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.