The Relationship between Emotionally Laden Landmarks, Spatial Abilities, and Personality Traits: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Separate research lines have shown that the way we process spatial information is influenced by individual factors, such as personality traits and basic spatial abilities. Alongside, recent studies suggest that environmental landmarks can be represented differently depending on their emotional content. However, to our knowledge, no study has addressed so far the issue of whether there is a relationship between individual factors and the way we represent and use spatial information that conveys emotional content. Therefore, this exploratory study aimed to (i) investigate the relationship between personality traits and the use of spatial strategies in relation to emotional stimuli; (ii) investigate if a different pattern emerges according to a body- or object-based spatial encodings. After watching movies of routes characterized by positive, negative, or neutral landmarks, participants performed a "route continuation" (RC, i.e., left/right decision) and a "distance comparison" task (DC, i.e., what was the landmark closest to X?). Furthermore, participants performed a mental rotation task (MR), the Corsi block tapping (CBT), and the Bergen right-left discrimination tests (B-RL). Personality traits were assessed through the Ten Item Personality Inventory (TIPI). Results showed that a better performance at the RC task was associated with higher scores at CBT tasks in the positive condition and at B-RL test and agreeableness scale from TIPI in both positive and neutral conditions. Instead, the MR task positively correlated with the DC task in all conditions. In sum, individuals' spatial abilities, personality traits, and task requests influenced the way emotionally laden landmarks were memorized.

Keywords: emotions; individual differences; spatial memory.

Figure 1

The figure depicts the three different layouts. S = starting positions; E = end of the route. The grey circles indicate where the images were put along the route. Virtual routes had the same length and temporal duration.

Figure 2

The figure depicts two examples (on the right and left) of participants’ first view perspective during the navigation of the route. Note: the images on the route’s wall are copyright-free images taken from https://www.pexels.com/it-it/. They are present in this figure just for illustration purposes.

Figure 3

(a) The panel of the Corsi block tapping (CBT) is shown from the experimenter’s perspective. The CBT task was performed live by well-trained experimenters. Besides, they had fully memorized all sequences in order to keep timing at a standard pace. The participants did not see the numbers on the blocks; (b) An example of the stimuli used in the Bergen right-left discrimination task; (c) an example of the stimuli used in the mental rotation task.

Figure 4

The figure depicts an example of stimuli used as trials in the route continuation task (a) and in the distance comparison task (b). The images in the figure are not those from the international affective picture system (IAPS), but they are copyright-free images taken from https://www.pexels.com/it-it/. They are present in this figure just for illustration purposes.