Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research suggests that individuals tend to form spatial habits (i.e., placing objects in consistent locations inspace) when interacting with objects in the environment (Zhu & Risko, in press). However, it remains unclear how such spatialhabits develop over time. One hypothesis suggests that spatial habit formation may involve a process of stabilization wherebyindividuals’ spatial behaviour becomes progressively fixed over time. We examined this hypothesis by tracking students’ seatingbehaviour in a classroom over the course of 12 weeks. Although individuals’ overall seating choice tended to cluster near wherethey initially sat, we did not find evidence that seating behaviour stabilized over time. However, a significant curvilinear relationwas found between seating choice and time such that seating choice near the beginning and end of the 12-week period weremore varied than those in the middle. Implications of this study for understanding spatial habit formation will be discussed.