Immediate memory for spatial location.

Abstract

Performance characteristics in a spatial-location task were examined nonmetrically. In Experiment 1, subjects reproduced the location of a dot either from immediate memory or while actually looking at the dot. Independent analyses of accuracy and the direction of incorrect reproductions yielded evidence for a fast-acting locational-memory process that may be distinct both from locational-perception processes and from response-bias processes. In Experiment 2, three different borders were used to vary the distance between the dot location and the border. Locational-memory accuracy increased as this distance decreased. Incorrect reproductions tended to occur toward rather than away from the border, and the robustness of this effect decreased for dot locations nearer to the border. Due to our nonmetric approach, the above conclusions are generalizable to all psychological conceptions whose spatial distances are monotonically related to the external spatial distances investigated here. A weighted-distortion theory of memory for spatial location is proposed to account for these and other findings.