Preparing a cup of tea and writing a letter: Do script-based actions influence the representation of a real environment?

Two experiments were conducted to examine the effects of having people carr y out a sequence of actions in an environment on the spatial representation of the environment. The actions were linked by a common theme (e.g., writi ng a letter). In Experiment 1, the spatial memory test consisted of an impl icit and an explicit, distance estimation task. Participants who carried ou t a sequence of script-based actions inside a room showed poor spatial know ledge for this particular room las compared to a control room or control pa rticipants) in disregarding actual distances in their estimations. This def icit could be due to a loss of or to a poorer encoding of spatial informati on. The results of Experiment 2, however, suggest that the effects observed in Experiment 1 seem to depend on the spatial task used. With a positionin g task at testing, we could not find any evidence that could be attributed to an action-based change of a spatial mental representation. In sum, the g eneral hypothesis of action-based influences on mental spatial representati ons was not corroborated by convincing data.