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.
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Wagener, M., Mecklenbräuker, S., Wippich, W., Saathoff, J.E., Melzer, A. (2000). Preparing a Cup of Tea and Writing a Letter: Do Script-Based Actions Influence the Representation of a Real Environment?. In: Freksa, C., Habel, C., Brauer, W., Wender, K.F. (eds) Spatial Cognition II. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1849. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45460-8_26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45460-8_26
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