Putting emotions in routes: the influence of emotionally laden landmarks on spatial memory

Abstract

The aim of this study was to assess how people memorize spatial information of emotionally laden landmarks along a route and if the emotional value of the landmarks affects the way metric and configurational properties of the route itself are represented. Three groups of participants were asked to watch a movie of a virtual walk along a route. The route could contain positive, negative, or neutral landmarks. Afterwards, participants were asked to: (a) recognize the landmarks; (b) imagine to walk distances between landmarks; (c) indicate the position of the landmarks along the route; (d) judge the length of the route; (e) draw the route. Results showed that participants who watched the route with positive landmarks were more accurate in locating the landmarks along the route and drawing the route. On the other hand, participants in the negative condition judged the route as longer than participants in the other two conditions and were less accurate in mentally reproducing distances between landmarks. The data will be interpreted in the light of the "feelings-as-information theory" by Schwarz (2010) and the most recent evidence about the effect of emotions on spatial memory. In brief, the evidence collected in this study supports the idea that spatial cognition emerges from the interaction between an organism and contextual characteristics.

The Role of Emotional Landmarks in Embodied and Not-Embodied Tasks

“…Indeed, in tracking the route on the map participants with high/low positive emotional landmarks and low negative emotional landmarks were more accurate than neutral landmarks and high negative emotional landmarks. These findings are in line with Ruotolo et al's results [11], revealing that participants in the positive condition were more accurate than those in the neutral condition in drawing the route as well as in indicating the landmarks location. In addition, Palmiero and Piccardi [3] highlighted that emotional landmarks, especially positive, promote accurate spatial representation.…”

“…In this vein, the key role of emotional landmarks defined in terms of valence (positive/pleasant vs. negative/unpleasant) and arousal (activating/excited vs. deactivating/calm) has only recently been investigated [3,10,11], demonstrating that positive/negative emotions increasing landmark's salience improve performance in navigational memory tasks. More specifically, Palmiero and Piccardi [3] observed that both positive and negative emotional landmarks equally enhanced the ability to learn a path, but just positive emotional ones improved the reproduction of the path on the map.…”

“…In such a sense, it is interesting that the egocentric-based navigation is affected by emotional stimuli. Ruotolo et al [11] showed that participants were more accurate in locating the positive landmarks along the route and drawing the route. In contrast, they found that participants judged the route as longer and were less accurate in mentally reproducing distances between landmarks when they were exposed to negative landmarks.…”

Difficulties and Problem-Solving Strategies in Wayfinding Among Adults With Cognitive Disabilities: A Look at the Bigger Picture

“…While this evaluation of the event is the object of a separate question and is not necessarily related to the emotion actually triggered during the event, this difference between participants is consistent with the absence of joy observed in the experimental group. This finding is interesting from a wayfinding perspective, as it converges with existing evidence in the literature that emotion structures spatial representations (Storbeck and Maswood, 2016;Ruotolo et al, 2019). In particular, it has been reported that being in a positive mood and feeling positive emotions enhance spatial working memory by favoring a better retention of spatial information, in comparison to being in a negative mood (Storbeck and Maswood, 2016).…”

“…In particular, it has been reported that being in a positive mood and feeling positive emotions enhance spatial working memory by favoring a better retention of spatial information, in comparison to being in a negative mood (Storbeck and Maswood, 2016). Emotion has also been shown to affect spatial representations: participants who see landmarks inducing positive emotions while walking along a virtual route are able to locate the landmarks more accurately on a map afterward, as well as drawing the route, in comparison to participants who see landmarks inducing negative emotions (Ruotolo et al, 2019). These findings have led some researchers to advocate the use of positive emotion to improve wayfinding apps in everyday life, for example by computing instructions and routes based on street segments previously evaluated positively by users to allow for an "emotional" wayfinding (Gartner, 2012;Huang et al, 2014).…”