Reversal of the Alignment Effect: Influence of Visualization and Spatial Set Size

When asked to engage in judgments of relative direction (JRD), subjects routinely show a performance benefit when the judgments are aligned with the perspective used at encoding. This alignment effect (Roskos-Ewoldsen, McNamara, Shelton, & Carr, 1998) has recently been shown to reverse itself when subjects rotate 180°(Waller, Montello, Richardson, & Hegarty, 2002), consistent with the predictions of egocentric spatial representation theories (Wang & Spelke, 2000). This study shows how the alignment effect is not only dependent upon individual differences in the quality of a subject’s target visualization, but also that this benefit for latency, but not error, diminishes as target set size increases.