Distraction Shrinks Space

Abstract

Research investigating how people remember the distance of paths they walk has shown two apparently conflicting effects of experience during encoding on subsequent distance judgments. By the feature accumulation effect discrete path features such as turns, houses or other landmarks cause an increase in remembered distance. By the distractor effect performance of a concurrent task during path encoding causes a decrease in remembered distance. This study asks: What are the conditions that determine whether the feature accumulation or the distractor effect dominates distortions of space? In two experiments, blindfolded participants were guided along two legs of a right triangle while reciting nonsense syllables. On some trials, one of the two legs contained features: horizontally mounted car antennas (gates) that bent out of the way as participants walked past. At the end of the second leg participants either indicated the remembered path leg lengths using their hands in a ratio estimation task, or attempted to walk, unguided, straight back to the beginning. In addition to response mode, visual access to the paths and time between encoding and response were manipulated to determine if these factors affected feature accumulation or distractor effects. Path legs with added features were remembered as shorter than those without, but this result was only significant in the haptic response mode data. This finding suggests that when people form spatial memory representations with the intention of navigating in room-scale spaces, interfering with information accumulation substantially distorts spatial memory.Knowledge of distances helps humans navigate, remain oriented, plan routes and give directions. Attempts to measure mental representations of distance produce varying results depending in large part on how the distances are encoded and recalled (for reviews see Montello, 1997;. Previous studies have shown that across a range of circumstances, paths with more features (e.g., turns, intersections, landmarks) tend to be remembered as longer than paths with fewer features. In contrast, two studies by Glasauer and colleagues (Glasauer, Schneider, Grasso & Ivanenko, 2007;Glasauer et al., 2009) have shown that paths walked while counting backward by sevens are perceived as shorter than paths walked without a concurrent task. The current study examines the effects of path features on remembered distance for paths walked with a concurrent task. By using a conjunction of the conditions that give rise to the expanding and shrinking of distance representations, we aim to understand the mechanisms responsible for these contrasting, systematic distortions in spatial memory.

The influence of everyday events on prospective timing “in the moment”

“…However, some studies have found the opposite result. Liverence and Scholl (2012), for example, found that stimuli with more perceived segments were judged as shorter (see also Predebon, 1996;Sargent, Zacks, Philbeck, & Flores, 2013). Thus, it is still unclear how and when contextual changes exert their influence on prospective timing.…”

Failure to see money on a tree: inattentional blindness for objects that guided behavior

“…Thus cell phone use while walking leads to inattentional blindness for interesting objects near an individual’s path ( Hyman et al, 2010 ). Other forms of distraction and divided attention also lead to inattentional blindness ( Chabris et al, 2011 ) and to mistaken judgments of walking distance ( Sargent et al, 2013 ). In spite of lapses of awareness in these studies, people successfully navigated through complex environments.…”