Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The ability to integrate locations viewed sequentially into a unified representation spatial integration is important forcultivating an accurate mental map. We investigate the cognitive strategies underlying this process by manipulating theencoding experience. Participants viewed an array piecemeal and experienced the transition between viewpoints by rotat-ing the array or moving around it. At test, participants reconstructed the layout by placing stamps of the spatial locationson a blank map. Participants who rotated the array at encoding mainly reconstructed the array by rotating it at test. How-ever, those who moved around it were equally likely to use a rotation or observer movement strategy during reconstruction,and did so more accurately than those who learned the array via rotation, regardless of strategy choice. Importantly, allparticipants used motion to reconstruct the array in a step-wise manner. These findings suggest that movement around aspatial array is key to flexible spatial integration.