COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY 13, 149-206 (1981) Orientation in Cognitive Maps DOUGLAS L. HINTZMAN,~ARLA S-O'DELL, AND DAVIDR.ARNDT University of Oregon In 14 experiments, subjects had to “point to” surrounding environmental loca- tions (targets) while imagining themselves in a particular spot facing in various directions (orientations). The spatial information was either committed to memory (cognitive maps) or directly presented on each trial in the visual or tactile mod- ality. Reaction times (RT) indicated that orientation shifts were achieved through mental rotation in the visual task, but not in the cognitive map or tactile tasks. Further, in the latter two tasks targets were located most quickly when they were adjacent to or opposire the imagined orientation. Several explanations of this finding were tested. Various aspects of the data suggest that cognitive maps are not strictly holistic, but consist of orientation-specific representations, and-at least in part-of relational propositions specific to object pairs. The experiments reported here are concerned with how we keep track of the locations of things around us when, because of our movements, their positions with respect to our body coordinates are continually un- dergoing change. Consider a concrete example: you sit facing a desk, a window at your left, a bookcase behind you, and a telephone at your right. If you now turn to face the window, the locations of all the objects relative to your body coordinates have changed. We seem to be able to keep track of where things are, under such circumstances, with little difficulty-so little, in fact, that the underlying cognitive processes are “transparent”; that is, it is not intuitively obvious that a problem for psychological theory exists. Recent trends in cognitive theory suggest the hypothesis that the loca- tions of objects with respect to one’s body coordinates are represented directly, in propositional form. Hence in the preceding example the rele- vant information might be represented as: desk front-of self; telephone right-of self; etc. However, there is a problem with such a representation. Even a simple rotation of the self in the environment would require that the relational terms (front-of, etc.) of many propositions be changed in order to keep the internal representation up to date. Continual movement would require the monitoring of all such spatial propositions and the updating of the ones that have changed-surely a complex computational This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant BNS 76-01830. The authors thank F. Attneave, R. W. Byrne, P. A. Carpenter, G. W. Evans, M. J. Nissen, M. I. Posner, and F. Restle for their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. Requests for reprints should be sent to Douglas L. Hintzman, Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403. 149 OOlO-0285/81/020149-58$05.00/O Copyright @ 1981 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.