Acquisition of Cognitive Aspect Maps

Two experiments investigated the cognitive consequences of acquiring different aspects of a novel visual scene. Subjects were presented with map-like configurations, in which subsets of elements shared perceptual or action-related features. As observed previously, feature sharing facilitated judging the spatial relationship between elements, suggesting the integration of spatial and non-spatial information. Then, the same configuration was presented again but both the features' dimension and the subsets defined by them were changed. In Experiment 1, where all spatial judgments were performed in front of the visible configuration, neither the novel features nor the inter-element relations they implied were acquired. In Experiment 2, where the configurations were to be memorized before the critical judgments were made, novel features were acquired, in part counteracting previous effects of feature overlap. Results suggest that different, subsequently acquired aspects of the same scene are integrated into a common cognitive map.