Models of spatial updating attempt to explain how representations of spatial relationships between the actor and objects in the environment change as the actor moves. In allocentric models, object locations are encoded in an external reference frame, and only the actor's position and orientation in that reference frame need to be updated. Thus, spatial updating should be independent of the number of objects in the environment (set size). In egocentric updating models, object locations are encoded relative to the actor, so the location of each object relative to the actor must be updated as the actor moves. Thus, spatial updating efficiency should depend on set size. We examined which model better accounts for human spatial updating by having people reconstruct the locations of varying numbers of virtual objects either from the original study position or from a changed viewing position. In consistency with the egocentric updating model, object localization following a viewpoint change was affected by the number of objects in the environment.

Inhibition of return (IOR) has long been viewed as a foraging facilitator in visual search. We investigated the contribution of IOR in a task that approximates natural foraging more closely than typical visual search tasks. Participants in a fully immersive virtual reality environment manually searched an array of leaves for a hidden piece of fruit, using a wand to select and examine each leaf location. Search was slower than in typical IOR paradigms, taking seconds instead of a few hundred milliseconds. Participants also made a speeded response when they detected a flashing leaf that either was or was not in a previously searched location. Responses were slower when the flashing leaf was in a previously searched location than when it was in an unvisited location. These results generalize IOR to an approximation of a naturalistic visual search setting and support the hypothesis that IOR can facilitate foraging. The experiment also constitutes the first use of a fully immersive virtual reality display in the study of IOR.

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This research extends findings that implicit and explicit attitudes may diverge to a consumer evaluation task using multiple measures of implicit evaluation: Evaluative Movement Assessment (EMA; Brendl, Markman, & Messner, 2005) and Evaluative Priming (Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams,1995). These measures were significantly associated with each other for both positive and negative implicit attitudes. Neither measure predicted explicit liking of the product or explicit intention to purchase the product. We believe this to be the first such demonstrated divergence in a naturalistic, unconditioned consumer evaluation context. Implicit activation of the product’s emotional benefit (e.g., “relaxation”), as assessed in a lexical decision task (LDT), was not associated with the EMA or evaluative priming, but was significantly associated with both explicit emotional state (e.g., relaxation) and explicit purchase intention; the latter effect was not mediated by explicit emotion.

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