ROUTE KNOWLEDGE IN DIFFERENT SPATIAL FRAMES OF REFERENCE

Orienting oneself in space requires establishing a correspondence betw een various spatial frames of reference (SFR) in which the same inform ation about the environment can be encoded in different ways and forma ts. In this encoding process, one key point is the alignment of the SF Rs, which may require additional operations such as a mental or real r otation. Three experiments were conducted to investigate the process o f spatial orientation under aligned and misaligned conditions. Subject s were shown animated sequences of decision points perceived along a r oute (Experiments 1 and 2) or verbal route instructions (Experiment 3) to which they had to attribute a path on a map. The results showed th at when the orientations of the map and the route were different (misa lignment) both total time and errors increased. The route length (Expe riment 1), and the need to reverse the direction of the path (reverse response condition in Experiments 2 and 3) also led to a decline in pe rformance. In Experiment 3, the map-rotation strategy was found to be pertinent for solving misaligned spatial problems.