Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Does the mind rely on similar systems of spatial representation for both perception and action? Here, we assess the format of location representations in two simple spatial localization tasks. In one task, participants simply remembered the location of an item based solely on visual input. In another, participants remembered the location of a point in space based solely on haptic input. A careful analysis of participants’ errors revealed that, in both tasks, participants errors were more consistent with the use of polar coordinates than Cartesian coordinates. Thus, we argue that polar coordinates may be a common format for representing location information across modalities.