Three intervening tasks (verbal, visual and arithmetical) performed by participants during the study of a scene were used to explicit the nature of the memorized representations of the distances between scene objects. The effect of the intervening task on the distances representation was determined through the exponent of the power function estimated from the judgments of distances based on estimation and the distances between objects in scene. The results showed that the exponents obtained by magnitude estimation do not differ from unit. On the contrary, the exponents obtained on the basis of the x and y coordinates of the drawing have lower values. The exponents obtained with judgments of magnitude and from the y axe of the drawing were affected by the arithmetical task performed during the study time, but not by visual one. These results suggest that visual and spatial components contribute with differentiated weights for the representation quality.
visuo-spatial memory; intervening tasks; magnitude estimation; drawing
