title: Representation, space and Hollywood Squares: Looking at things that aren't there anymore creator: Richardson, Daniel creator: Spivey, Michael subject: Behavioral Neuroscience subject: Cognitive Psychology subject: Perceptual Cognitive Psychology description: It has been argued that the human cognitive system is capable of using spatial indexes or oculomotor coordinates to relieve working memory load (Ballard, Hayhoe, Pook & Rao, 1997) track multiple moving items through occlusion (Scholl & Pylyshyn, 1999) or link incompatible cognitive and sensorimotor codes (Bridgeman and Huemer, 1998). Here we examine the use of such spatial information in memory for semantic information. Previous research has often focused on the role of task demands and the level of automaticity in the encoding of spatial location in memory tasks. We present five experiments where location is irrelevant to the task, and participants' encoding of spatial information is measured implicitly by their looking behavior during recall. In a paradigm developed from Spivey and Geng (submitted), participants were presented with pieces of auditory, semantic information as part of an event occurring in one of four regions of a computer screen. In front of a blank grid, they were asked a question relating to one of those facts. Under certain conditions it was found that during the question period participants made significantly more saccades to the empty region of space where the semantic information had been previously presented. Our findings are discussed in relation to previous research on memory and spatial location, the dorsal and ventral streams of the visual system, and the notion of a cognitive-perceptual system using spatial indexes to exploit the stability of the external world. publisher: Elsevier Science contributor: Mehler, Jacques date: 2000-09 type: Journal (Paginated) type: PeerReviewed format: application/pdf identifier: http://cogprints.org/904/3/HollywoodSquares.pdf identifier: Richardson, Daniel and Spivey, Michael (2000) Representation, space and Hollywood Squares: Looking at things that aren't there anymore. [Journal (Paginated)] relation: http://cogprints.org/904/