If you have ever wondered how you manage to keep track of the immense amount of information coming to you each day, you might want to thank the positional tagging system in your mind. Understanding spatial positional associations can help inform strategies for learning, teaching, and getting information out to the public.
Journal/conference: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
Link to research (DOI): 10.1177/17470218241255690
Organisation/s: Murdoch University
Funder: The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Media release
From: Murdoch University
If you have ever wondered how you manage to keep track of the immense amount of information coming to you each day, you might want to thank the positional tagging system in your mind.A recent study from Murdoch University investigated the Spatial Positional Association of Response Codes (SPoARC) effect to determine just how organisation in our cognitive systems is impacted by the way we receive our information.Murdoch University Pro Vice Chancellor of Health and Education Professor Guillermo Campitelli said the new understandings have valuable applications in everyday life.“Understanding spatial positional association can help inform strategies to determine how to present information for learning and teaching and to disseminate information to the public,” Professor Campitelli said.Murdoch University PhD student and lead author, Hannah Fenwick said the study focused on the spacing and order of information.“As humans we store and process a vast amount of information in the mind, and for us to make sense of this information our mind needs to organise it efficiently,” Ms Fenwick said.“Studies investigating serial order in working memory have shown that participants from Western cultures are faster at responding to items presented at the beginning of a sequence using their left hand and faster at responding to items at the end with their right hand.“This is known as the SPoARC effect, which provides evidence that our mind spatially tags information in our memory system from left to right consistent with our culture’s reading and writing direction.“Our study investigated the flexibility of spatialisation by testing the effect that distance between items presented on a screen has on the magnitude of the SPoARC effect.“We hypothesised that by increasing the distance between items on a screen, a larger Spatial Positional Association of Response Codes would be found.“What we found was that no matter how the information is spaced on a screen or page, it will be treated the same way by your mind.“These findings add to the robust evidence of the SPoARC effect and deepen understanding of how the human mind organises information, which has significant implications for improving memory retention strategies and enhancing learning techniques.”The full published research, Spatial organisation in the human mind as a function of the distance between stimuli is available in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.