Spatial Reasoning with Multiple Intrinsic Frames of Reference

Overview

Journal Exp Psychol

Specialty Psychology

Date 2011 Jul 20

PMID 21768066

Citations 3

Authors

Franklin P Tamborello 2nd

Yanlong Sun

Hongbin Wang

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Establishing and updating spatial relationships between objects in the environment is vital to maintaining situation awareness and supporting many socio-spatial tasks. In a complex environment, people often need to utilize multiple reference systems that are intrinsic to different objects (intrinsic frame of reference, IFOR), but these IFORs may conflict with each other in one or more ways. Current spatial cognition theories do not adequately address how people handle multi-IFOR reasoning problems. Two experiments manipulated relative orientations of two task-relevant objects with intrinsic axes of orientation as well as their relative task salience. Response times (RTs) decreased with increasing salience of the targeted IFOR. In addition, RTs increased as a consequence of intrinsic orientation conflict, but not by amount of orientation difference. The results suggest that people encounter difficulties when they have to process two conflicting IFOR representations, and that they seem to prioritize processing of each IFOR by salience.

Citing Articles

The choice of intrinsic axis under multi-cue conditions.

Li J, Xie N, Zhao W Cogn Process. 2019; 20(2):195-202.

PMID: 30661154 DOI: 10.1007/s10339-019-00903-4.

Insight into others' minds: spatio-temporal representations by intrinsic frame of reference.

Sun Y, Wang H Front Hum Neurosci. 2014; 8:58.

PMID: 24592226 PMC: 3924045. DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00058.

The parietal cortex in sensemaking: the dissociation of multiple types of spatial information.

Sun Y, Wang H Comput Intell Neurosci. 2013; 2013:152073.

PMID: 23710165 PMC: 3654633. DOI: 10.1155/2013/152073.

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