Spatial representation of described environments: the characteristics of verbal descriptions and the role of physical movement

Recent findings support the assumption that the verbal description of an environment allows the creation of a mental representation of the environment that is functionally equivalent to that deriving from direct perception. Moreover, the verbal descriptions of an environment are commonly used in daily life to communicate with both sighted people in remote environment or visually impaired people. However, many questions on this topic still need to be answered, especially regarding the characteristics of the verbal descriptions and the potential fostering effect of physical movements. Thus, the aim of the present work was to shed light on the role of the physical movements in supporting the verbal descriptions, after a brief examination of some features important for the verbal descriptions. The first part of the manuscript deals with the specific characteristics of the verbal description which could affect the corresponding mental representation. Thus, the influence of the serial position effect on different types of verbal stimuli has been investigated in order to clarify whether people are able to remember all the information provided with a verbal description of an environment or systematically lose information positioned in the central part of the description. Then, the effect of the direction of the verbal description (Clockwise or Counterclockwise) on the recall performance/modality has been considered; I found that people prefers to recall spatial relations that are congruent with the description encoded, extending a well-established effect of memory congruency also to the domain of spatial representation. The second part of the thesis, instead, deals with the influence of physical movement on spatial updating within described environments. Even though several researchers focused on the role of movement in immediate and remote environments, only few of them investigated its role on verbally described environments; moreover, they mainly targeted their studies on imagined movements, rotation and translation, neglecting more ecological movements, such as physical walking. Thus, two separate experiments shed light on the contribution of physical walking compared to both physical and imagined rotation, on spatial updating – that is, the ability to keep track of the self-to-object relations during observer’s movement. By manipulating the movements required during the encoding of the description or after the description, results suggested different effects of the multisensory pattern of information provided by physical walking on spatial updating, depending on the situation in which the movements were executed. Finally, a third experiment, which used an ecological experimental procedure, examined the effectiveness of the physical exploration of an environment in fostering the development of an adequate spatial representation. In conclusion, the results provide further evidence for the effectiveness of adopting verbal material to describe an environment, and highlight the important role of the physical movements in enhancing people’s ability to successfully interact with the described environments.