Perspective in spatial perception, representations, and descriptions

When we experience an environment, it is perceived from a particular viewpoint. An environment can be experienced from within (embedded perspective) or from outside (external perspective). This dissertation explored whether the perspective from which an environment is learned is encoded in spatial mental representations. Three theoretical models were tested: representations are perspective-free, representations encode both perspectives, and representations encode learned perspective, but can be transformed to access the other perspective.; Experiment 1 inventoried linguistic features that signal perspective in descriptions. Results show that perspective is conveyed in lexical, clausal, and discourse levels of language.; Experiment 2 tested how perspective is encoded in memory by examining whether a well-learned environment could be described from an unlearned perspective. Participants were asked to describe the layout of a building learned via navigation from an embedded or external perspective. Speakers were able to describe the environment from the unlearned perspective. The data upheld predictions of all three models.; In Experiment 3 participants learned a novel environment by navigation or map viewing. They described the environment from a perspective that matched or mismatched their learned perspective. Although participants who learned the environment from an external perspective could produce embedded descriptions, participants who learned the environment from an embedded perspective could not provide external descriptions. Instead, these speakers described the environment from the perspective in which it was experienced. In a subsequent non-linguistic task, learning condition but not speaking condition affected the way participants drew maps of the environment. These findings do not support the predictions of the perspective-free and multiple-perspective models of representation.; The results of Experiments 2 and 3 suggest that learned perspective is stored in mental representations, but a representation can be transformed to another perspective if adequate route or survey knowledge about the environment is obtained. Experiment 4 evaluated whether a map drawing task would induce survey knowledge in participants who had limited embedded experience with an environment. This task was not sufficient to transform the representation to the unlearned perspective.; The concluding chapter presents a process model of how spatial information is represented and how it is transformed for communicative tasks.