Representation, space and Hollywood Squares: looking at things that aren'tthere anymore

It has been argued that the human cognitive system is capable of using spat ial indexes or oculomotor coordinates to relieve working memory load (Balla rd, D. H., Hayhoe, M. M., Pook, P. K., & Rao, R. P. N. (1997). Behavioral a nd Brain Sciences, 20(4), 723), track multiple moving items through occlusi on (Scholl, D. J., & Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1999). Cognitive Psychology, 38, 259) or link incompatible cognitive and sensorimotor codes (Bridgeman, B., & Hu emer, V. (1998). Consciousness and Cognition, 7, 454). Here we examine the use of such spatial information in memory for semantic information. Previou s research has often focused on the role of task demands and thr level of a utomaticity in the encoding of spatial location in memory tasks. We present five experiments where location is irrelevant to the task, and participant s' encoding of spatial information is measured implicitly by their looking behavior during recall. In a paradigm developed from Spivey and Geng (Spive y, M. J., & Geng, J. (2000). submitted for publication), participants were presented with pieces of auditory, semantic information as part of an event occurring in one of four regions of a computer screen. In front of a blank grid, they were asked a question relating to one of those facts. Under cer tain conditions it was found that during the question period participants m ade significantly more saccades to the empty region of space where the sema ntic information had been previously presented. Our findings are discussed in relation to previous research on memory and spatial location, the dorsal and ventral streams of the visual system, and the notion of a cognitive-pe rceptual system using spatial indexes to exploit the stability of the exter nal world. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.