Alexia Galati

The protagonist's first perspective influences the encoding of spatial information in narratives.

Three experiments examined the first-perspective alignment effect that is observed when retrieving spatial information from memory about described environments. Participants read narratives that described the viewpoint of a protagonist in fictitious environments and then pointed to the memorized locations of described objects from imagined perspectives. Results from Experiments 1 and 2 showed that performance was best when participants responded from the protagonists first perspective even though object locations were described from a different perspective. In Experiment 3, in which participants were physically oriented with the perspective used to describe object locations, performance from that description perspective was better than that from the protagonists first perspective, which was, in turn, better than performance from other perspectives. These findings suggest that when reading narratives, people default to using a reference frame that is aligned with their own facing direction, although physical movement may facilitate retrieval from other perspectives.

Gesturing integrates top-down and bottom-up information: Joint effects of speakers' expectations and addressees' feedback

Abstract Speakers adapt their speech based on both prior expectations and incoming cues about their addressees’ informational needs (Kuhlen and Brennan 2010). Here, we investigate whether top-down information, such as speakers’ expectations about addressees’ attentiveness, and bottom-up cues, such as addressees’ feedback during conversation, also influence speakers’ gestures. In 39 dyads, addressees were either attentive when speakers told a joke or else distracted by a second task, while speakers expected addressees to be either attentive or distracted. Independently of adjustments in speech, both speakers’ expectations and addressees’ feedback shaped quantitative and qualitative aspects of gesturing. Speakers gestured more frequently when their prior expectations matched addressees’ actual behavior. Moreover, speakers with attentive addressees gestured more in the periphery of gesture space when they expected addressees to be attentive. These systematic adjustments in gesturing suggest that speakers flexibly adapt to their addressees by integrating bottom-up cues available during the interaction in light of attributions made from top-down expectations. That these sources of information lead to adjustments patterning similarly in speech and gesture informs theoretical frameworks of how different modalities are deployed and coordinated in dialogue.

Integration of spatial relations across perceptual experiences

People often carry out tasks that entail coordinating spatial information encoded in temporally and/or spatially distinct perceptual experiences. Much research has been conducted to determine whether such spatial information is integrated into a single spatial representation or whether it is kept in separate representations that can be related at the time of retrieval. Here, we review the existing literature on the integration of spatial information and present results from a new experiment aimed at examining whether locations encoded from different perspectives in the same physical environments are integrated into a single spatial representation. Overall, our findings, coupled with those from other studies, suggest that separate spatial representations are maintained in memory.

Egocentric updating of remote locations.

The study examined whether people update remote spatial locations in unfamiliar environments during physical movement. Participants learned a layout of objects from one perspective and carried out perspective-taking trials after physically rotating to a new perspective in either the same room as learning or in an adjacent room. Prior to rotation in the adjacent room participants were instructed to visualize the objects as being around them. Responses to perspective-taking trials involved either pointing or verbal labeling. In both testing environments, participants pointed more efficiently from imagined perspectives aligned with either the initial learning perspective or their current facing orientation than from a novel imagined perspective; this indicates that they had updated the encoded spatial relations during the physical rotation and treated remote objects as immediate. Differences in performance among perspectives were less pronounced for verbal labeling in both environments, suggesting that this response mode is more flexibly used from imagined perspectives.

What’s so difficult with adopting imagined perspectives?

Research on spatial cognition suggests that transformation processes and/or spatial conflicts may influence performance on mental perspective-taking tasks. However, conflicting findings have complicated our understanding about the processes involved in perspective-taking, particularly those giving rise to angular disparity effects, whereby performance worsens as the imagined perspective adopted deviates from one’s actual perspective. Based on data from experiments involving mental perspective-taking in immediate and remote spatial layouts, we propose here a novel account for the difficulty with perspective-taking. According to this account, the main difficulty lies in maintaining an imagined perspective in working memory, especially in the presence of salient sensorimotor information.

Spatial Updating in Narratives

Across two experiments we investigated spatial updating in environments encoded through narratives. In Experiment 1, in which participants were given visualization instructions to imagine the protagonist’s movement, they formed an initial representation during learning but did not update it during subsequent described movement. In Experiment 2, in which participants were instructed to physically move in space towards the directions of the described objects prior to testing, there was evidence for spatial updating. Overall, findings indicate that physical movement can cause participants to link a spatial representation of a remote environment to a sensorimotor framework and update the locations of remote objects while they move.

Collaborating in spatial tasks: how partners coordinate their spatial memories and descriptions

We summarize findings from a study examining whether the availability of the conversational partner’s spatial viewpoint influences the speaker’s spatial memories, description strategies, their joint efficiency and accuracy on the task, as well as the partner’s resulting spatial memories. In 18 pairs, Directors described to a misaligned Matcher arrays that they learned while either knowing their Matcher’s viewpoint or not. Memory tests preceding descriptions revealed that Directors represented their Matcher’s viewpoint when known in advance. Moreover, Directors adapted the perspective of their descriptions according to each other’s cognitive demands, given their misalignment. The number of conversational turns pairs took to coordinate suggested that pairs’ strategies were effective at minimizing their collective effort. Nonetheless, in terms of accuracy on the task, pairs reconstructed more distorted arrays the more partner-centered descriptions Directors used. The Directors’ descriptions also predicted Matchers’ facilitation for their own perspective in memory tests following the description. Together, these findings demonstrate that partners in collaborative spatial tasks adapt their respective memory representations and descriptions contingently with the aim of optimizing coordination.