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ERIC Number: EJ1056055
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2013-Sep
Pages: 19
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0278-7393
EISSN: N/A
Cognitive Operations on Space and Their Impact on the Precision of Location Memory
Lansdale, Mark; Humphries, Joyce; Flynn, Victoria
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, v39 n5 p1501-1519 Sep 2013
Learning about object locations in space usually involves the summation of information from different experiences of that space and requires various cognitive operations to make this possible. These processes are poorly understood and, in the extreme, may not occur--leading to mutual exclusivity of memories (Baguley, Lansdale, Lines, & Parkin, 2006). In this article, we investigate how the precision of location memory--evident in near-miss errors in recall--is related to different transformational processes in spatial cognition. Analyzing errors and latencies in a sequential comparative judgment task, 4 experiments show that the precision with which location is represented in memory is specifically degraded by a subset of transformations in which an object location encoded in reference to 1 anchor point is recalibrated in relation to another. We discuss the general implications of this finding for spatial learning and demonstrate that, rather than being a special case, exclusivity in memory is the extreme expression of a rational trade-off between the benefit of combining spatial information from more than 1 memory and the reduced precision that follows from the transformations required.
American Psychological Association. Journals Department, 750 First Street NE, Washington, DC 20002. Tel: 800-374-2721; Tel: 202-336-5510; Fax: 202-336-5502; e-mail: order@apa.org; Web site: http://www.apa.org
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: United Kingdom (Leicester)
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A