The role of memory and perspective shifts in systematic biases during object location estimation.

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

doi:10.3758/s13414-022-02445-y

Abstract

In the current study, we investigated whether the introduction of perspective shifts in a spatial memory task results in systematic biases in object location estimations. To do so, we asked participants to first encode the position of an object in a virtual room and then to report its position from memory or perception following a perspective shift. Overall, our results showed that participants made systematic errors in estimating object positions in the same direction as the perspective shift. Notably, this bias was present in both memory and perception conditions. We propose that the observed systematic bias was driven by difficulties in understanding the perspective shifts that led participants to use an egocentric representation of object positions as an anchor when estimating the object location following a perspective shift.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13414-022-02445-y.

Highlights

An important aspect of spatial cognition is the ability to recognize and remember spatial locations across different viewpoints (Epstein, et al, 1999; Waller & Nadel, 2013)
If physical movement is absent, recognition across different perspectives can be achieved by forming a viewpoint-independent spatial representation or by mentally manipulating a viewpoint-dependent representation, a process known as spatial perspective taking (Holmes et al, 2018; King et al, 2002; Klencklen et al, 2012)
Since we are primarily interested in the direction of the error as a function of perspective shift direction, we have focused our analysis on signed error

Summary

Introduction

An important aspect of spatial cognition is the ability to recognize and remember spatial locations across different viewpoints (Epstein, et al, 1999; Waller & Nadel, 2013). In order to recognize locations from different perspectives, one needs to bind objects/landmarks that define the place to their spatial locations (Postma et al, 2004). Once such a spatial representation of a place is formed, self-motion information can be used to update the representation to allow recognition from a different perspective (Bülthoff & Christou, 2000; Waller et al, 2002). You can remember that the car is parked at a particular area in a car park, or you can formulate a more precise representation in which you remember the row in which the car is parked and the relative position in this row (back, center, front)

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