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

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.

Spatial memory for vertical locations.

Most studies on spatial memory refer to the horizontal plane, leaving an open question as to whether findings generalize to vertical spaces where gravity and the visual upright of our surrounding space are salient orientation cues. In three experiments, we examined which reference frame is used to organize memory for vertical locations: the one based on the body vertical, the visual-room vertical, or the direction of gravity. Participants judged interobject spatial relationships learned from a vertical layout in a virtual room. During learning and testing, we varied the orientation of the participant's body (upright vs. lying sideways) and the visually presented room relative to gravity (e.g., rotated by 90° along the frontal plane). Across all experiments, participants made quicker or more accurate judgments when the room was oriented in the same way as during learning with respect to their body, irrespective of their orientations relative to gravity. This suggests that participants employed an egocentric body-based reference frame for representing vertical object locations. Our study also revealed an effect of body-gravity alignment during testing. Participants recalled spatial relations more accurately when upright, regardless of the body and visual-room orientation during learning. This finding is consistent with a hypothesis of selection conflict between different reference frames. Overall, our results suggest that a body-based reference frame is preferred over salient allocentric reference frames in memory for vertical locations perceived from a single view. Further, memory of vertical space seems to be tuned to work best in the default upright body orientation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).