Elsevier

Cognitive Psychology

Volume 34, Issue 2, November 1997, Pages 160-190
Cognitive Psychology

Regular Article
Symmetry and Asymmetry of Human Spatial Memory

https://doi.org/10.1006/cogp.1997.0669Get rights and content

Abstract

Six experiments investigated the limiting conditions on and the causes of asymmetries in estimates of euclidean distance. Participants estimated distances between locations on recently learned maps or between buildings on their college campus. Estimates between landmarks and neighboring nonlandmarks were often asymmetric, but estimates between other pairs of locations were typically symmetric. These and other results were inconsistent with the predictions of models that attribute asymmetries to stimulus or to retrieval bias. A contextual scaling model of asymmetry is proposed. According to this model, asymmetries in proximity judgments are caused by general principles of human memory and judgment: (a) Stimuli differ in the contexts they establish in working memory, and (b) magnitude estimates are scaled by the context in which they are made.

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The research described in this paper was supported in part by National Science Foundation Grants BNS 8820224 and SBR 9222002. Portions of this work were reported at the 35th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, St. Louis, MO, November, 1994. We thank Elizabeth McCullough, Penny Plant, and Melinda Rea for their assistance in conducting the experiments. We are also grateful to David Gilden and to Eric Holman for consultation at various stages of the research, and to Nancy Franklin, Dan Montello, Robert Nosofsky, Nora Newcombe, and Tom Palmeri for comments on the paper.

Address correspondence and reprint requests to Timothy P. McNamara, Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, 111 21st Ave. South, Nashville, TN 37240.

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