Common retrieval processes in producers and comprehenders of spatial information in a noninteractive task

Abstract

This study explores spatial representations generated by people playing either the producer’s or the comprehender’s role in non-interactive settings, under identical manipulations of the communication modality (pointing vs. verbal directions) and the type of body rotation (physical vs. imagined). Results showed that these manipulations consistently modulated the accessibility of the target locations in similar ways for both producers and comprehenders, indicating a common retrieval process of spatial information in the absence of alignment cues. In both roles, the accessibility pattern to directions obtained when using the pointing gesture was heavily dependent on the rotation type, whereas that was less so when using verbal directions. The results also demonstrated that the differences in the accessibility patterns arise at the response encoding stage (in production) and at the response decoding stage (in comprehension), suggesting a functional parallelism in the response system between the two communication roles. The commonality in the retrieval processes is a genuine phenomenon that should be taken into account when attributing exclusively the phenomenon of spatial alignment to the interactive efforts performed by producers and comprehenders.