Imagined Perspective-Changing Within and Across Novel Environments

Results suggesting that changing perspective and switching across spatial environments held in memory are processes that take place in parallel were obtained from a task-switching experiment. Participants learned layouts of objects in two virtual rooms and then were asked to use their memories to locate the objects from various imagined viewing perspectives. Results revealed that, even after experiencing multiple perspectives, participants maintained viewpoint-dependent memories for the layouts, and that the latencies for changing perspective within and across environments followed a different pattern depending on whether participants imagined adopting the preferred view.