Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Memorizing and retrieving information about the spatial layoutof one’s surrounding is of crucial importance for humans. Wepropose a new theory of spatial memory of immediate envi-ronments and develop a corresponding computational realiza-tion. We detail how the theory explains key findings on humanspatial memory (use) and show that the computational real-ization accounts well for human behavior from three pertinentexperiments. One implication of the theory’s success is thatenduring spatial memory representations may best be concep-tualized as flexible combinations of representation structuresand reference frames.