The Effect of Spatial Tasks on Visually Impaired Peoples' Wayfinding Abilities

Thirty-eight people with visual impairments learned a 483-meter novel route through a university campus in four groups: verbalization, modeling, pointing, and control. The performance of all four groups improved with greater experience of the route, but the modeling group improved more than did the control group

Rapid development of cognitive maps in people with visual impairments when exploring novel geographic spaces

'Cognitive' map is a term that refers to a person's environmental knowledge. Anyone experiencing a new environment will, over time, develop a cognitive representation of that environment, including information derived from that environment (e.g., about places, routes and spatial relationships) and information about personal experiences (e.g. memories about events at locations and attitudes towards places). There is now a great deal of research into the cognitive maps of sighted people (see Golledge, 1999; Kitchin & Freundschuh, 2000; Kitchin & Blades, in press), but there is comparatively little research into the cognitive maps of people with visual impairments

Altering Object Representations Through Category Learning

Previous research has shown that objects that are grouped together in the same category become more similar to each other and that objects that are grouped in different categories become increasingly dissimilar, as measured by similarity ratings and psychophysical discriminations. These ndings are consistent with two theories of the inuence of concept learning on similarity. By a Strategic Judgment Bias account, the categories associated with objects are explicitly used as cues for determining similarity, and objects that are categorized together are judged to be more similar because similarity is not only a function of the objects themselves, but also the objects' category labels. By a Changed Object Description account, category learning alters the description of the objects themselves, emphasizing properties that are relevant for categorization. A new method for distinguishing between these accounts is introduced which measures the difference between the similarity ratings of categorized objects to a neutral object. The results indicate both strategic biases based on category labels and genuine representational change, with the strategic bias affecting mostly objects belonging to different categories and the representational change affecting mostly objects belonging to the same category

Copyright 1995 Psychonomic Society, Inc. 370

he speed of response selection. Some of the most remarkable demonstrations of the interplay between perception and action are provided by phenomena of stimulus--response (S--R) compatibility. Among these, effects of spatial S--R compatibility are especially robust. If, for instance, subjects respond to left and right stimuli by pressing a left or right key, left responses are faster to left stimuli than to right stimuli, whereas right responses are faster to right stimuli than to left stimuli (e.g., Broadbent & Gregory, 1962). That is, spatial S--R correspondence permits better performance than does noncorrespondence. A particularly convincing manifestation of the robustness of spatial compatibility effects is that S--R correspondence affects choice reactions even with irrelevant stimulus position. If, for instance, subjects respond with a left or right key to a nonspatial attribute of a stimulus that appears randomly on the left or right side, responses are faster if stimulus and

Rapid development of cognitive maps in people with visual impairments when exploring novel geographic spaces

'Cognitive' map is a term that refers to a person's environmental knowledge. Anyone experiencing a new environment will, over time, develop a cognitive representation of that environment, including information derived from that environment (e.g., about places, routes and spatial relationships) and information about personal experiences (e.g. memories about events at locations and attitudes towards places). There is now a great deal of research into the cognitive maps of sighted people (see Golledge, 1999; Kitchin & Freundschuh, 2000; Kitchin & Blades, in press), but there is comparatively little research into the cognitive maps of people with visual impairments

Rapid development of cognitive maps in people with visual impairments when exploring novel geographic spaces

'Cognitive' map is a term that refers to a person's environmental knowledge. Anyone experiencing a new environment will, over time, develop a cognitive representation of that environment, including information derived from that environment (e.g., about places, routes and spatial relationships) and information about personal experiences (e.g. memories about events at locations and attitudes towards places). There is now a great deal of research into the cognitive maps of sighted people (see Golledge, 1999; Kitchin & Freundschuh, 2000; Kitchin & Blades, in press), but there is comparatively little research into the cognitive maps of people with visual impairments

The Effect of Spatial Tasks on Visually Impaired Peoples' Wayfinding Abilities

Thirty-eight people with visual impairments learned a 483-meter novel route through a university campus in four groups: verbalization, modeling, pointing, and control. The performance of all four groups improved with greater experience of the route, but the modeling group improved more than did the control group

The Effect of Spatial Tasks on Visually Impaired Peoples' Wayfinding Abilities

Thirty-eight people with visual impairments learned a 483-meter novel route through a university campus in four groups: verbalization, modeling, pointing, and control. The performance of all four groups improved with greater experience of the route, but the modeling group improved more than did the control group

The Effect of Spatial Tasks on Visually Impaired Peoples' Wayfinding Abilities

Thirty-eight people with visual impairments learned a 483-meter novel route through a university campus in four groups: verbalization, modeling, pointing, and control. The performance of all four groups improved with greater experience of the route, but the modeling group improved more than did the control group