(1) Department of Psychology, Tufts University, 490 Boston Ave., 02155 Medford, MA;(2) Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois;(3) University of California, Berkeley, California
Abstract:
The way a space is learned can result in a mental mapthat is either temporally or spatially organized (Curiel & Radvansky, 1998). The present study examined the availability of spatial information under maplearning conditions where either temporal or spatial organization has been previously observed. The finding was that people were fairly accurate in tasks that explicitly required the use of spatial information. However, there was a particular advantage for having a spatially organized mental mapin a direction judgment task, especially for short distances where fine-grained knowledge was required. In contrast, there was no clear advantage for either group in a distance estimation task. These data are interpreted in the context of Huttenlocher’s category adjustment model.
