Viewpoint Dependence in Human Spatial Memory

Cognitive and Computational Models of Spatial Representation

Volume

Papers from the 1996 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

We summarize two lines of research that investigated whether human spatial memories are viewpoint dependent (e.g., viewer-centered reference frames) viewpoint independent (e.g., scene-centered reference frames). In one series of experiments, participants made judgments of relative direction after viewing a Sl~ti~_ I layout from one or two perspectives. The findings indicated that multiple views of a spatial layout produced multiple viewpoint dependent representations in memory. These findings were corroborated by the results of experiments on scene recognition. These experimentshowed, again, that multiple views of a scene produced multiple viewpoint dependent representations in memory, and that a novel view of a familiar scene was recognized by normalizing it to the most similar view in memory. A preliminary computational model of scene recognition formalizes several of these concepts.