Spatial priming in visual search: memory for body-centred information

Abstract

Publisher's copyright statement:The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractSpatial priming allows memory for target locations to be evaluated, whereby when a target appears in the same location across trials participants become more efficient at locating it and consequently their search times decrease. Previously, we reported priming effects when the location of a target was repeated with respect to the participant's body but not when it was repeated relative to their eye position; therefore, suggesting that body-centred information is available after a delay of at least a few seconds (Ball, Smith, Ellison, & Schenk, 2010). However, we were unable to rule out the possibility that stable allocentric cues within the room may have contributed to the priming effects that we observed. In this current study we introduced a condition where, despite participants moving to a new location between trials, their position relative to the target was maintained. This movement disrupted any potential room-based cues about the target location. While we replicated our previous finding of priming when the location of the target was repeated relative to the viewer when no movement was required, we also found robust priming effects when participants moved to a new location in between trials. Thus, we provide clear evidence that in our spatial priming task the location of the target was being coded in a body-centred reference frame and that this information is available after a delay.

Spatial priming in ecologically relevant reference frames

“…It is worth noting that our spatiotopic condition-even after disentangling it from object-centered effects in Experiment 2-could still reflect contributions from multiple possible coordinate frames, including absolute (i.e., worldcentered) coordinates, screen-centered coordinates (which could also include an object/frame-centered contribution from the outline of the monitor), and head-or body-centered coordinates (see Ball et al, 2010Ball et al, , 2011. Further teasing apart each of these different non-retinotopic contributions would be an interesting avenue for future research, but Experiment 2 demonstrates that at least some component of priming exists in allocentric, object-centered coordinates, while additional priming persists even when this object array changes (pure spatiotopic condition).…”

“…Note that these experiments are not directly comparable to the present work, because we held body/head position constant, and one could imagine that priming may be dependent on the observer maintaining a single position. Ball et al (2011) included a head-centered manipulation, using two adjacent monitors and asking participants to move their head position from trial to trial to respond to stimuli on the two respective monitors. They found evidence only for head-centered (i.e., egocentric) priming, analogous to the probability cueing results by Jiang et al (Jiang & Swallow, 2013a, 2013bJiang, Swallow, & Capistrano, 2013, Jiang, Swallow, Rosenbaum, et al, 2013, Jiang, Swallow, & Sun, 2014, Jiang, Won, et al, 2014.…”

“…Indeed, target predictability has been shown to yield RT benefits above and beyond standard spatial priming (Geyer & Müller, 2009). This limitation also applies to subsequent studies that examined spatial priming across multiple reference frames (e.g., Ball, Smith, Ellison & Schenk, 2009;2010;Ball, Lane, Ellison & Schenk, 2011), in that it was not possible to disentangle the potential contributions of spatial priming from strategic goal-driven attention based on explicit knowledge. Given the broad array of goal-driven attentional phenomena documented in the literature, this distinction is critical, and we thus removed potential goal-driven components from our experimental design.…”

Comparing the effect of temporal delay on the availability of egocentric and allocentric information in visual search

“…We found that the priming effects were selectively 5 Delay in spatial priming observed when the location of the target was repeated with respect to the observer's body but not when its position relative to the fixation point, and thus eye position, was repeated, suggesting that the target location was coded in body-centred coordinates [34]. We went on to provide stronger evidence of body-centred coding: when participants moved to a different location between trials significant priming effects were still observed [35]. This last study allowed us to rule out the influence of any uncontrolled allocentric cues within the room on the participant's performance as the participant's movement invalidated these cues.…”