Dual effects of spatial updating in both real and virtual environments

When people move around in their environment, spatial updating, which is an automatic cognitive process, is essential to ensuring people can keep track of their relations between them and the surrounding objects, and to "recalculating" the relative position and orientation of those objects with regard to the current position of the persons. Despite the facilitating effect of spatial updating to people's mental representation in most circumstances as demonstrated in most of the existing literature, the effect sometimes can be adversarial. For instance, some research suggested that even though people were asked to ignore their locomotion, it is difficult to suppress updating of the spatial representation during movement. The current two studies were conducted to systematically investigate the dual effects of spatial updating in both real and virtual environments. We used a typical spatial updating paradigm to explore the effects of scene familiarity (familiar vs. novel) and person's locomotion (stationary vs. moving) on change detection accuracy (target object moved or not). The results indicated a facilitating effect of spatial updating in the novel scene condition, but an adversarial effect in the familiar scene condition-the dual effects, in both real and virtual environments.

Can the memory of an object be enhanced by imagining its loss?

Previous investigations examining salient memories have demonstrated that personal memories that are important to individuals and contain emotional information are better remembered than neutral events.Using behavioral and brain-imaging experiments,the present studies explored whether the previous finding was applicable imagined loss.In a behavioral experiment,a free recall paradigm was used to compare the memory performance of individuals who imagined loss with that of individuals who imagined importance.The superior memory performance conferred by imagining loss was constrained to ordinary items of low to medium importance and did not generalize to vital items.Moreover,brain imaging evidence revealed that the activation in certain brain regions was stronger when participants were imagining the loss of ordinary items of low to medium importance compared to vital items.These brain regions included cognitive effort-related areas(such as the parietal cortex and middle prefrontal cortex) and areas related to emotional experiences and emotion-related memories(such as the amygdala,parahippocampal gyrus,and posterior cingulate gyrus).Our study provides a new way of exploring the superior memory performance when imagining loss and enriches the literature on memory enhancement by contributing to a deeper understanding of the psychological mechanisms related to the imagining of vital losses.