Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We examined the role of spatial frames of reference in memory. Participants first verified verbal descriptions of visualscenes and spatial relations among objects. The intrinsic and relative frames of reference (FoR) were used in the descriptionswith varying degrees of frequency (availability) and veridicality (reliability). Descriptions in the two reference frames couldeither be equally distributed in terms of validity or were biased towards one of the two spatial frames. Participants’ performanceon the memory task was sensitive to priming from the spatial FoRs and their information distribution characteristics. Thesefindings provide evidence that spatial frames of reference can influence spatial memory and that this influence depends onthe frequency of use of a given frame of reference and on the frequency with which it is associated with valid and reliableinformation.