Abstract

The present research was conducted to investigate the processes of updating the mental models in learning a spatial layout and reading a text about the layout. In the Morrow et al. study, they assumed that the process of updating mental model is completed immediately after reading the text. To examine this assumption, three experiments were conducted. In all the experiment, subjects first overlearn a spatial layout of a building and then given a text describing a layout of the building and character's actions which are moving things from a starting room to one of the two rooms that are equal in geometric distance from the starting room but different in route distance. Immediately after reading the target sentence in the text, subjects were given an one-word probe recognition task(Experiment 1), or a 'two-objects same-room' judgement task(Experiment 2 & 3). In Experiment 3, an additional instruction explicitly inducing subject to form a spatial mental model of the layout was given. The general results showed that a difference in route distance had marginal effect on the reading time(Exp 1& 2), but had significant effect on the probe recognition time when the test probe was given about the things in the newly moved-to room but not when in the starting room. This results suggest that updating of mental models are not completed right after reading the target sentence but still in progress, and that the route distance is the only variable that has some influence in this later updating process.