THE CONTENT AND ORGANIZATION OF COMMUNICATION ABOUT OBJECT LOCATIONS

Four experiments investigated how the communication task and the struc ture of the environment influence the content and organization of mess ages about object locations. Subjects placed objects in a multi-level space and later wrote down messages about the object locations. In Exp eriments 1 and 2, subjects treated the tasks of giving directions abou t how to find the objects and describing where the objects were differ ently. Hierarchically organized directions usually started with the mo st general spatial unit, but descriptions usually started with the mos t specific spatial unit. Experiments 3 and 4 examined how the spatial relation between the object and the small and large landmarks influenc ed the order in which landmarks were mentioned. Subjects almost always mentioned large landmarks before small landmarks when the object was on the large landmark and next to the small landmark. In contrast, sub jects mentioned large landmarks before small landmarks only about half of the time when the object was on the large landmark and in, on, or underneath the small landmark. Together, the communication task and th e organization of landmarks determined the extent to which spatial mes sages were hierarchically organized. Findings are discussed in terms o f what they tell us about the pragmatics of spatial communication and conceptual biases in coding object locations. (C) 1995 Academic Press. Inc.