中華心理學刊
民95 ， 48 卷， 2 期， 139-150

Hui-Li Lin（Fu Jen Catholic University）

Abstract

The present study aimed to examine how spatial terms affect spatial memory under various degrees of task difficulty. Two experiments were conducted. Chinese-English bilingual subjects’ performance of spatial memory was measured. In both experiments, subjects were given cues of English or Chinese spatial terms before they were asked to remember a picture. In Exp.1, task difficulty was manipulated by changing the duration of  exposure to the picture. In Exp.2, task difficulty was manipulated by changing the amount of contents to be
remembered. By comparing the performance between the cued groups and the control groups under different levels of task difficulty, a crossover interaction effect between language and task difficulty on the non-linguistic spatial memory was observed. Implications for future studies are suggested accordingly. 

Keywords: spatial memory, spatial terms, task difficulty, bilingualism