Mental Scanning of Images Constructed from Visual Experience or Verbal Descriptions: The Impact of Survey versus Route Perspective

Abstract

Mental scanning was used to assess the metric properties of mental spatial representations derived from visual experience or the processing of a verbal description, and either from survey or route perspective. Participants were asked to mentally scan their images of a spatial environment they had learned in one of the following four conditions: Visual-Survey, Visual-Route, Verbal-Survey, and Verbal-Route. No difference was found between the scanning times of the visual and verbal conditions, but scanning times were shorter after survey than route acquisition, and they consistently increased as a function of the Euclidean distances between locations in the environment, with steeper slopes in the route conditions. These results demonstrate that mental spatial representations derived from different sources and perspectives are endowed with similar properties and preserve the Euclidean characteristics of the original environment, but that they are easier to access when they have been constructed from a survey perspective.