ABSTRACT
Previous studies (e.g., Rieser, 1989) have established that physical rotations result in effortless updating of spatial information contained in visually perceived scenes. The present experiment provided evidence that this is not the case for scenes that are encoded through texts. Performance was better under the perspective that the scenes were learned than under novel perspectives, regardless of whether rotations were physical or imagined. In addition, the experiment suggested that the orientation of the ecological frame affects spatial performance even when people operate in a purely represented framework.
