Spatial models derived from verbal descriptions of fictitious environments: The influence of study time and the individual differences in visuo-spatial ability

The format of mental models derived from verbal descriptions of fictitious environments has been investigated varying the perspective (survey and route) in which informationally equivalent descriptions of the same environments were written, and asking subjects to verify both survey and route statements requiring spatial inferences. The aim of the present study was to consider the role of study time and the influence of visuo-spatial ability on mental representation derived from spatial descriptions, in a sentence by sentence text presentation condition. The results showed that significant congruency effects -that is, a performance facilitation when descriptions and inferential statements were written in the same perspective-emerged only for survey perspective both after one and three presentations of the text. In addition, subjects with high visuo-spatial ability performed better than subjects with low visuo-spatial ability when they read survey texts. No difference emerged when they read route texts. This pattern of results indicated that: 1) route and survey descriptions of environments led to different mental representations; 2) study time affected level of performance but did not modify the format of mental representations; 3) individual differences should be taken into account when studying the influence of perspective on mental representation.