Final Report Summary - OSSMA (Multiple Systems of Spatial Memory: Their role in Reasoning and Action)
Spatial memory refers to our ability to remember and recall the location of items in an environment, such as the arrangement of furniture in our home, the positions of landmarks in a city, etc. This ability is fundamental for carrying out many tasks of everyday life including planning routes, orienting in space, navigating the environment and so on.
In many cases, the tasks we carry out entail reasoning about locations that are present in our immediate surroundings. Remembering whilst at home where we left our keys is one example of reasoning about immediate locations. In other cases, we rely on memories about more distant places and objects such as when planning a route in a city we are about to revisit. The project entitled “Multiple systems of spatial memory: their role in reasoning and action” (OSSMA) investigated these two types of memories with a series of behavioral experiments. In the typical paradigm used in the experiments, participants first studied an environment -- typically using a Virtual Reality head-mounted display -- and then had their memory tested under various conditions and either while they were still within/near the studied environment or after they had moved to a different location. The experiments examined the influence on the encoding and retrieval of spatial information of a number of variables such as the orientation of the participant during learning and testing, the intrinsic structure/symmetry of the layout and the enclosing space, the modality in which spatial information was provided, the presence of redundant visual information etc.
The primary result from the experiments is that while spatial memories about immediate environments are strongly influenced by the orientation of the observer at the time of retrieval, memories about non-immediate environments are immune to such an effect. This suggests that when reasoning about objects in their immediate surroundings people rely on a sensorimotor representation that maintains self-to-object relations. This egocentric representation is updated as the observer changes position and/or orientation in the immediate environment and is possibly maintained simultaneously with an allocentric representation (i.e. one that codes object-to-object relations) that will govern reasoning once the observer moves to a distal location.
These conclusions provide important input for the design of more accurate theories on spatial memory but they also have important implications for the design of various modern tools and facilities such as on-line and off-line navigation systems, user interfaces for tele-operating equipment (e.g. search-and-rescue robots, and surgical tools).
In many cases, the tasks we carry out entail reasoning about locations that are present in our immediate surroundings. Remembering whilst at home where we left our keys is one example of reasoning about immediate locations. In other cases, we rely on memories about more distant places and objects such as when planning a route in a city we are about to revisit. The project entitled “Multiple systems of spatial memory: their role in reasoning and action” (OSSMA) investigated these two types of memories with a series of behavioral experiments. In the typical paradigm used in the experiments, participants first studied an environment -- typically using a Virtual Reality head-mounted display -- and then had their memory tested under various conditions and either while they were still within/near the studied environment or after they had moved to a different location. The experiments examined the influence on the encoding and retrieval of spatial information of a number of variables such as the orientation of the participant during learning and testing, the intrinsic structure/symmetry of the layout and the enclosing space, the modality in which spatial information was provided, the presence of redundant visual information etc.
The primary result from the experiments is that while spatial memories about immediate environments are strongly influenced by the orientation of the observer at the time of retrieval, memories about non-immediate environments are immune to such an effect. This suggests that when reasoning about objects in their immediate surroundings people rely on a sensorimotor representation that maintains self-to-object relations. This egocentric representation is updated as the observer changes position and/or orientation in the immediate environment and is possibly maintained simultaneously with an allocentric representation (i.e. one that codes object-to-object relations) that will govern reasoning once the observer moves to a distal location.
These conclusions provide important input for the design of more accurate theories on spatial memory but they also have important implications for the design of various modern tools and facilities such as on-line and off-line navigation systems, user interfaces for tele-operating equipment (e.g. search-and-rescue robots, and surgical tools).