Changing perspective within and across environments

Perspective change within a single environment is a slow and effortful process. However, little research has addressed perspective change across multiple environments. Using a task-set switching paradigm, subjects judged spatial relationships between target locations from differing perspectives. Response times were longer when successive trials probed different perspectives. However, this cost was greater when perspective was changed within a single environment compared to when it was changed across two environments. This result indicates that the processing of perspective change, and perhaps general spatial reasoning, differs in these two cases. Implications for theories of perspective change and environmental knowledge are discussed.