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Abstract

The integration of spatial information across different perspectives or viewpoints is a frequent spatial task, yet relatively little is known about it. In the present experiment, participants were shown three target locations from one point of view. After walking away, they either returned to the same location or to a novel location before being presented with three additional target locations. Their task was to plan and navigate the shortest possible path to visit all six target locations. To successfully solve the task, participants had to integrate different pieces of spatial information acquired from two viewpoints. We measured errors and the time to reach the first target. An increased number of errors in the condition including a perspective shift strongly suggest that participants
encoded different views which had to be aligned in order to
be integrated. The fact that the increase in errors primarily originated from the target locations presented first, indicates that the first view was transformed into the perspective of the second view. Neither egocentric updating, allocentric orientation-independent memory, nor allocentric reference axis theory can explain these results.