Spatial Influence of Environmental Axes in a Baseball Field

Abstract

We investigated the influence of environmental axes in a baseball field. In Experiment 1, participants walked either a path in the prototypical orientation (home plate to second base) or one which was rotated 225°. Recall for object locations was best when participants imagined themselves aligned with axes salient from the experienced orientation. In Experiment 2, when learning was through a route text, there was less of an influence of environmental axes. In Experiment 3, when participants walked both paths, memories were good for the atypical orientation, suggesting that task-specific spatial cues can be more influential than a prior conceptual north.

Keywords:

• spatial memory
• navigation
• reference frames

Notes

¹We verified this intuition by asking 5 males and 5 females, with varying degrees of familiarity with the sport of baseball, to draw a baseball field. All drew the field with home plate at the bottom of the page and second base towards the top, as in Figure 1.

²In Experiment 2, three of the “objects” in the layout were people. Because of the expectation that people move, using them as objects in the text may have led to greater pointing error. However, error in Experiment 2 was actually slightly lower than in Experiments 1 and 3.