Spatial Memory and Spatial Judgment
Does spatial memory satisfy metric properties? In a recent paper (McNamara & Diwadkar, in press) we report a set of six experiments which tested whether estimates of distance between locations satisfied the metric constraint of symmetry. Our results indicated that distance estimations between locations systematically violated the axiom of symmetry. Distance estimates between salient locations (landmarks) and proximate less-salient locations (nonlandmarks) were consistently asymmetric but estimates between these and other locations generally preserved symmetry. This pattern is at odds with models which attribute asymmetries between items to stimulus bias (e.g., Holman, 1979; Nosofsky, 1991) or retrieval bias (e.g., Huttenlocher, Hedges, & Duncan, 1991). To account for these asymmetries we proposed an alternative contextual model. According to our account, distances between locations is retrieved from long term memory and then scaled in working memory as a function of the context in which they are retrieved. The context is established by retrieval cues. Because landmarks are better retrieval cues than nonlandmarks, they establish a larger scale in memory. Consequently proximate distances are underestimated (e.g., Holyoak & Mah, 1982) in the context of landmarks. The proposed model successfully accounted for most of our data including reversals in asymmetry as a function of context. In the discussion, we compare and contrasted our model with other models of symmetry and asymmetry (e.g., Krumhansl, 1978; Tversky, 1977).

REFERENCES

Holman, E. W. (1979). Monotonic models for asymmetric proximities. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 20, 1-15. Holyoak, K. J., & Mah, W. A. (1982). Cognitive reference points in judgments of symbolic magnitude. Cognitive Psychology, 14, 328-352. Huttenlocher, J., Hedges, L. V., & Duncan, S. (1991). Categories and particulars: Prototype effects in estimating spatial location. Psychological Review, 98, 352-376. Krumhansl, C. L. (1978). Concerning the applicability of geometric models to similarity data: The interrelationship between similarity and spatial density. Psychological Review, 85, 445-463.

McNamara, T. P., & Diwadkar, V. A. (in press). Symmetry and asymmetry of human spatial memory. Cognitive Psychology.

Nosofsky, R. M. (1991). Stimulus bias, asymmetric similarity, and classification. Cognitive Psychology, 23, 94-140.

Tversky, A. (1977). Features of similarity. Psychological Review, 84, 327-352.

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