Reinstating location improves mnemonic access but not fidelity of visual mental representations

Abstract

Despite a wealth of research showing a link between spatial information and visual memory, no work has yet directly assessed the impact of location manipulations on mnemonic fidelity of visual features in memory. In a virtual reality environment, we want to investigate how manipulation of location at recall (i.e., corresponding vs. non-corresponding to the location where the object was previously encoded) will affect mnemonic fidelity of color information in memory. Based on the conceptualization of spatial information as a basic feature to support the generation of detailed visual mental representations, we predict that the reinstatement of location during recall will improve mnemonic fidelity. These findings will aid our understanding of the particular role of spatial information in visual memory.