Biomedical subjects

M Jeanne Sholl

Publications and source records attributed to M Jeanne Sholl.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Allocentric-heading recall and its relation to self-reported sense-of-direction.

A sense of direction (SOD) computes the body's facing direction relative to a reference frame grounded in the environment. The authors report on three experiments in which they used a heading-recall task to tap the functioning of a SOD system and then correlated task performance with self-reported SOD as a convergent test of the task's construct validity. On each heading-recall trial, the participant judged the photographer's allocentric heading when photographing a pictured outdoor scene. Participants were tested over the full range of SOD ratings in Experiment 1, and in Experiments 2 and 3 heading-recall at the SOD extremes was tested. In all experiments, there was wide variability in heading-recall accuracy that covaried with self-rated SOD. Parametric manipulation of various task parameters revealed some likely functional properties of the SOD system. The results support the psychological reality of a SOD system and further indicate that there are large individual differences in the efficacy with which the system functions.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Allocentric coding of object-to-object relations in overlearned and novel environments.

R. F. Wang and E. S. Spelke's (2000) finding that disorientation disrupts knowledge is consistent with egocentric but not allocentric coding of object location. The present experiments tested the hypothesis that egocentric coding may dominate early on but that once an allocentric representation is established, then target location is retrieved from it. This hypothesis predicts that disorientation will disrupt configuration knowledge in a novel environment, such as that used by Wang and Spelke, but not in an overlearned environment. Experiments 1 and 2 tested whether disorientation disrupted configuration knowledge of an overlearned environment, and Experiments 3-7 tested whether disorientation disrupted configuration knowledge of a novel, room-sized environment. In none of the experiments did disorientation disrupt configuration knowledge. Hence, in addition to showing allocentric coding of overlearned interlandmark relations, the present findings are consistent with the immediate availability of allocentric location codes in a novel, room-sized environment.

Environment↗

PubMed2004

The acquisition of vector knowledge and its relation to self-rated direction sense.

Self-rated sense of direction is reliably related to people's accuracy when pointing in the direction of unseen landmarks from imagined or actual perspectives. It is proposed that the cognitive substrate of accurate pointing responses is a vector representation, which is defined as an integrated network of displacement vectors. Experiment 1 isolated the body senses and tested displacement vector formation in a path-integration task. Experiment 2 isolated the visual modality and tested displacement vector formation in a virtual-learning task. Both experiments tested whether people reporting a good sense of direction (GSOD) were more likely to compute displacement vectors than people reporting a poor sense of direction (PSOD). The results showed that both GSOD and PSOD people computed displacement vectors in the path-integration task, but not in the virtual-learning task. When interlandmark relations were visually specified, GSOD people made more accurate pointing responses than PSOD people, adding to a growing body of cognitive correlates of self-rated direction sense.

Cognition↗

PubMed2002

The role of self-to-object updating in orientation-free performance on spatial-memory tasks.

A single view of a room-sized path produces an orientation-specific memory representation, yet when memory is tested at a location on the path, orientation-free performance is observed. Either a virtual-views or an updating hypothesis can account for orientation-free performance by attributing it, respectively, to an orientation-free long-term-memory representation or to a working-memory representation of the body's updated location relative to the path. Experiments 1 and 2 test these hypotheses by manipulating the test-site location and the complexity of the trajectory from the study site to the test site. Experiment 3 tests orientation to the test space as a function of trajectory complexity. Results support a virtual-views explanation for the orientation-free performance of males and an updating explanation for females.

Adolescent↗