The Influence Of The Conceived Position On The Automatic Spatial Updating In Multiple Environments

Human beings interact with environments all the time, as either an individual outside or an indispensable component of them. The spatial relationships between human beings and environments keep changing throughout the interaction. Navigators will be disoriented unless they keep tracking on the dynamic spatial relationships relating themselves to environments, i.e. spatial updating. Most researches of spatial updating focuses on spatial updating in single environment rather than multiple environments. But the latter occurs much more frequently so that plays more important role than the former in our daily lives. The previous research suggested that retrieving the encoded spatial representations of multiple environments occurred sequentially rather than simultaneously. Then what could affect the choice among the representations about these environments during spatial updating and how the choice mechanism operates are highlighted as critical topics.The previous researches did not conclude on allocating attention to the environmental properties concerning navigation, but the memory effect was observed in the memory test on the layout of objects, based on which, the present article focused on how foreground (or background) and the conceived position affected the automatic spatial updating. Moreover, the conclusion in the previous research that the multiple representations of environments could not be retrieved simultaneously laid the root for distinguishing foreground from background in the present article. Because of contrasting familiarity to unfamiliarity, or contrasting reality to imagination, or the asymmetry of the multiple environments, i.e. the relationships between the sets of spaces occupied by the environments, the influences of foreground (or background) and the conceived position on automatic spatial updating could not be examined in the same time in the previous researches.Based on the previous researches, the present article took two unfamiliar real scenes with diverse themes as an example to study the updating of spatial representation of multiple environments under two different conditions when the spaces occupied by these two environments coincide or have no intersection. The results showed that the conceived position did affect the retrieving of the encoded spatial representation about environments and the relative relationship between the spatial representations of these two environments when the spaces occupied by these two environments had no intersection and that the conclusion under the condition with an unfamiliar real environment and a familiar imagined one should not be generalized to the condition with two unfamiliar real environments. The results suggested that the conceived position alone did not suffice to affect the automatic spatial updating of multiple environments. The conceived position may work with other cues, such as, the appropriate sensory and perceptual cues, vestibular sensation, proprioception, and so on. The present article also explored the potential accounts, related experimental methods and the aim in the future research in the discussion.