David J. Bryant

Three Spaces of Spatial Cognition

As we move about and interact in the world, we keep track of different spaces, among them the space of navigation, the space immediately around the body, and the space of the body. We review research showing that these spaces are conceptualized differently. Knowledge of the space of navigation is systematically distorted. For example, people mentally rotate roads and land masses to greater correspondence with global reference frames, they mentally align roads and land masses, they overestimate distances near the viewpoint relative to those far from it. These and other distortions indicate that the space of navigation is schematized to elements and spatial relations relative to reference frames and perspective. The space around the body is organized into a mental framework consisting of extensions of the major axes of the body. Times to report objects around the body suggest that the relative accessibility of the axes depends on their perceptual and functional properties and the relation of the body to the...

Assessing spatial frameworks with object and direction probes

An experiment tested the generality of the spatial framework analysis (Bryant, Tversky, & Franklin, in press; Franklin & Tversky, 1990) to a task involving accessing directions of objects from object-name probes. Subjects read narrative descriptions of a person surrounded by objects to the front, back, and sides, and beyond the head, and beyond the feet. They were then probed with object names for direction terms or vice versa. Response times conformed to predictions of the spatial framework in both cases, indicating that the spatial framework pattern does not depend on the use of direction terms in testing.

Exceptions to recognition failure as a function of the encoded association between cue and target

The relation of the recognition failure of recallable words to overall recognition rates is largely invariant across conditions that influence both recall and recognition separately. In two experiments, the influence of the integration of the members of A-B word pairs on this relation was investigated, In Experiment 1, it was found that deviations of observed recognition failure from predictions of the Tulving-Wiseman function (Tulving & Wiseman, 1975) were produced by shallow, nonsemantic encoding. In Experiment 2, the association of category-to-instance pairs was varied. It was found that weak associates caused larger deviations of observed recognition failure from predicted recognition failure than did strong associates. Such results suggest that a strongly encoded association between cue and target elements of A-B pairs is a necessary condition for the adherence of data to the Tulving-Wiseman function. The implications of these findings for general models of memory are discussed.

Effect of Orientation in Haptic Reproduction of Line Length

We investigated the accuracy of haptic reproduction of line length and whether accuracy is influenced by line orientation. 13 blindfolded subjects felt along different line lengths at various orientations in the horizontal plane, then reproduced the line lengths in the same orientation as that felt. Efforts were made to equate learning and reproductive scanning movements. Reproductions of line lengths were a nonveridical power function of their true lengths, but the power function exponents did not differ across spatial orientations. It was concluded that people can encode line lengths across spatial orientations by a common power function if care is taken to equate proprioceptive information across learning and reproduction.

Spatial mental models from descriptions

Spatial language is widely used, both literally to describe space and figuratively to express a broad range of ideas. This article reviews two projects studying the nature of mental representations of space induced entirely by language. The first project investigates perspective in descriptions of large‐scale (e.g., convention center, town) space. People typically describe environments using a route or survey perspective, or a mixture of both. Route perspectives take a view from within the environment and describe the locations of landmarks with respect to a moving observer in terms of the observers left, right, front, and back. Survey perspectives take a view from above the environment and describe locations of landmarks with respect to each other in terms of north, south, east, and west. Features of the environment, such as having a single or multiple path, affect choice of perspective. In comprehension, readers seem to form the same perspective‐free mental representation irrespective of description perspective. They respond with equal speed and accuracy to inference questions from either perspective regardless of read perspective. The second project investigates mental representations of the objects located immediately around the body. Readers seem to form mental spatial frameworks, extensions of the three body axes, associating objects to the frameworks. The accessibility of the three axes depends on characteristics of the body, characteristics of the perceptual world, and posture of the observer. For example, for an upright observer, times to access objects along the head/feet axis are fastest because it is an asymmetric axis of the body and is correlated with the only asymmetric axis of the world, that created by gravity. Times to access objects along the front/back axis are next fastest as it is an asymmetric axis of the body, and times to the left/right axis are slowest as it is an axis with few asymmetries. Evidence for the spatial framework hypothesis was obtained in a variety of situations, varying posture, perspective, number of observers, and cause of reorientations.

Is preadaptation for language a necessary assumption

Preadaptation for language is an unnecessary assumption because intermediate stages of linguistic ability are possible and adaptive. Language could have evolved through gradual selection from structures exhibiting few features associated with modern structures. Without physical evidence pertaining to language ability in prehabilis hominids, it remains possible that selective pressures for language use preceded and necessitated modern neurolinguistic structures.

Strategic and perceptual factors producing tilt contrast in dot localization

Encoding spatial location in a frame of reference is often biased by both perceptual and strategic factors. For example,tilt contrast occurs when a line presented in the frame of horizontal and vertical axes appears to be repulsed from the nearest axis, including the diagonal axis of symmetry, due to symmetry perception mechanisms. Research has demonstrated, however, that people can adopt particular viewing strategies that eliminate this effect. In Experiment 1, a similar tilt contrast effect was observed when subjects reproduced from memory the position of a single dot in this reference frame. It was hypothesized that this effect resulted from a combination of strategic and perceptual factors. Specifically, people employ anorigin strategy, coding the location of the dot relative to the origin of the horizontal and vertical axes, thereby establishing a virtual line that appears tilted away from the axes due to the same perceptual processes affecting physically present lines. Two additional experiments support this hypothesis. In Experiment 2, no clear tilt contrast effect was observed in a perception condition, indicating that the tilt effect for dots cannot be accounted for by purely perceptual processes. In Experiment 3, the tilt contrast effect was found to be contingent upon the use of the origin strategy as opposed to a different strategy. The results demonstrate the importance of a viewers strategy in determining the pattern of distortion observed in spatial encoding.

Implicit associative responses influence encoding in memory

In list-learning experiments, the orienting question asked of one item may influence the processing of, and memory for, later items in the list. Four experiments demonstrated that words that are not related to their own orienting question, but that are semantically related to the question asked of a previous item, are better recalled than are words that are not related to any question in the list. Factors that influence this memory enhancement include the number of times relevant orienting questions appear during study, as well as the retention interval. Experiment 4 revealed that this effect is contingent upon conscious awareness: Item-category relations do not enhance recall if the subject is not aware of them. The results of the four experiments imply that semantic categories can be primed as implicit associativeresponses to words, which influence memory.

Euclidean metric representations of haptically explored triangles

This study explored whether people create Euclidean representations of 2-dimensional right triangles from touch and use them to make spatial inferences in accord with Euclidean distance axioms. Blindfolded participants who were instructed to form visual images of triangles felt the vertical and horizontal sides of right triangles, then estimated the lengths (but not the angles) of the 3 triangle sides. In these 3 experiments, length estimates conformed closely to the Euclidean metric when evaluated on application of the Pythagorean theorem. Participants who used a visual imaging strategy were accurate more often than those who used visual imagery less often. In Experiments 2 and 3, a hypotenuse inference was as accurate as a direct haptic judgment of the hypotenuse. These results demonstrated similar accuracy of the hypotenuse judgments when participants made verbal rather than haptic estimates. The findings indicate that participants can form Euclidean representations under certain conditions from felt 2-dimensional right triangles based on visual images.

Visual imagery versus visual experience of familiar individuals

Subjects rated the physical similarity of familiar individuals from photographs and mental images. Multidimensional scaling and hierarchical clustering techniques revealed little difference between photographs and mental images in the subjects’ similarity ratings. This result implies that people’s preexisting imaginal representations derived from direct experience are functionally equivalent to their visual percepts of human beings.