Preparing a cup of tea and writing a letter: Do script-based actions influence the representation of a real environment?

Two experiments were conducted to examine the effects of having
people carry out a sequence of actions in an environment on the spatial
representation of the environment. The actions were linked by a common theme
(e.g., writing a letter). In Experiment 1, the spatial memory test consisted of an
implicit and an explicit distance estimation task. Participants who carried out a
sequence of script-based actions inside a room showed poor spatial knowledge
for this particular room (as compared to a control room or control participants)
in disregarding actual distances in their estimations. This deficit could be due to
a loss of or to a poorer encoding of spatial information. The results of
Experiment 2, however, suggest that the effects observed in Experiment 1 seem
to depend on the spatial task used. With a positioning task at testing, we could
not find any evidence that could be attributed to an action-based change of a
spatial mental representation. In sum, the general hypothesis of action-based
influences on mental spatial representations was not corroborated by convincing
data.