Moving through imagined space: Mentally simulating locomotion during spatial description reading

Readers mentally simulate the perceptual and motoric elements related through text. Sound is one perceptual characteristic of these embodied simulations that has received little attention. Two experiments tested whether movement sounds (walking vs. running) or metronome pulses (fast vs. slow) would modulate reading speed and memory for two different types of spatial descriptions, route and survey. Route descriptions describe environments from a first-person, ground-level perspective whereas survey descriptions use an aerial overview perspective. Experiment 1 demonstrated that route description readers altered their reading speed in correspondence with both movement and metronome sounds, progressing through descriptions faster when hearing fast-paced versus slow-paced sounds. When reading survey descriptions, however, readers only modulated their reading speed while listening to metronome pulses. Those who showed the greatest reading time effects with the route description and footstep sounds also showed difficulty solving inferences from the survey perspective. Experiment 2 demonstrated that movement sounds influenced perceptions of distance traveled such that estimates of environmental scale increased after listening to running versus walking sounds. Taken together these results demonstrate that route description readers mentally simulate a journey through a described world, and these simulations and the resulting spatial memories can be guided by auditory information.