Dominique Lopiccolo¹ (), Alon Hafri¹; ¹University of Delaware

Representational momentum (RM) refers to the phenomenon where people reliably misremember an object's location as further along its implied motion path. While RM has been observed for a variety of transformations—ranging from rotating rectangles to melting ice to leaping ballet dancers—little is known about whether RM holds for spatial scaling, a non-rigid transformation that involves the resizing of an entity while retaining its shape. Scaling is critical to many spatial reasoning tasks, including map-reading, physical model construction, and geometric problem-solving. For this reason, it is important to know whether scaling is prone to the same distortions in visual memory observed for other transformations. This study sought to answer this question with a special focus on scaling in the context of geometric diagrams. Participants viewed dynamic displays involving two circles and a point in different spatial relations (e.g., inside, outside, intersecting). One of the circles either grew or shrank before the display was masked. Participants were tasked with selecting the exact last frame they saw from two options (neither of which was actually correct): one slightly later and one slightly earlier than the true target frame. We observed a significant RM effect: participants selected the later probe more often than the earlier one, with the effect more pronounced at the longer durations tested. Taken together, these findings suggest that spatial scaling induces RM effects in visual memory, paralleling other types of transformations. Our results contribute to a more general theory of RM and suggest broader implications for understanding geometric reasoning over spatial diagrams and memory for dynamic spatial relations.