No advantage for remembering horizontal over vertical spatial locations learned from a single viewpoint

Abstract

Previous behavioral and neurophysiological research has shown better memory for horizontal than for vertical locations. In these studies, participants navigated toward these locations. In the present study we investigated whether the orientation of the spatial plane per se was responsible for this difference. We thus had participants learn locations visually from a single perspective and retrieve them from multiple viewpoints. In three experiments, participants studied colored tags on a horizontally or vertically oriented board within a virtual room and recalled these locations with different layout orientations (Exp. 1) or from different room-based perspectives (Exps. 2 and 3). All experiments revealed evidence for equal recall performance in horizontal and vertical memory. In addition, the patterns for recall from different test orientations were rather similar. Consequently, our results suggest that memory is qualitatively similar for both vertical and horizontal two-dimensional locations, given that these locations are learned from a single viewpoint. Thus, prior differences in spatial memory may have originated from the structure of the space or the fact that participants navigated through it. Additionally, the strong performance advantages for perspective shifts (Exps. 2 and 3) relative to layout rotations (Exp. 1) suggest that configurational judgments are not only based on memory of the relations between target objects, but also encompass the relations between target objects and the surrounding room-for example, in the form of a memorized view.

Keywords: Horizontal; Orientation dependency; Spatial memory; Vertical.

Fig. 1

The virtual setup used in Experiment 1 for horizontal (left side) and vertical (right side) learning and testing. Participants learned a 3 × 3 object layout presented to them within a virtual room (top row). In a test trial, they always saw the center object, a second, reference object always located behind/above, and a target object, which they were asked to move to its correct location (bottom row). Participants were tested with different board orientations while remaining at the same position in the room. The present example corresponds to a board orientation of 45°. The correct target location is at the bottom. In Experiments 2 and 3, the whole room was rotated, and therefore the participants’ viewpoint in the room varied

Fig. 2

Angular error (left) and latency (right) in Experiment 1 as a function of test orientation: Experienced board orientation during learning (0°), the contra-aligned orientation (180°), and in-between orientations in both the horizontal (warm color) and vertical (cool color) planes. Error bars display standard errors of the means

Fig. 3

In Experiment 2 (as well as Exp. 3), the room orientations, and therefore the participant’s egocentric perspective on the board, varied across test trials (from 0° to 180°, in ± 45° steps). The present example corresponds to a room orientation of 45°. The learning phase remained identical to that in Experiment 1 (see Fig. 1, top row)

Fig. 4

Angular error (left) and latency (right) in Experiment 2 as a function of test orientation (or viewpoint): Experienced room orientation during learning (0°), the contra-aligned orientation (180°), and in-between orientations in both the horizontal (warm color) and vertical (cool color) planes. Error bars display standard errors of the means

Fig. 5

Angular error (left) and latency (right) for test trials of the first block and over all four blocks in Experiment 3 as a function of test orientation (or viewpoints): Experienced room orientation during learning (0°), the contra-aligned orientation (180°), and in-between orientations in both the horizontal (warm color) and vertical (cool color) planes. Error bars display standard errors of the means