In everyday life, our brain constantly builds spatial representations of the objects surrounding us. Many studies have investigated the nature of these spatial representations. It is well established that we use allocentric information in real-time and memory-guided movements. Most studies relied on small-scale and static experiments, leaving it unclear whether similar paradigms yield the same results on a larger scale using dynamic objects. We created a virtual reality task that required participants to encode the landing position of a virtual ball thrown by an avatar. Encoding differed in the nature of the task in that it was either purely perceptual (“view where the ball landed while standing still”—Experiment 1) or involved an action (“intercept the ball with the foot just before it lands”—Experiment 2). After encoding, participants were asked to place a real ball at the remembered landing position in the virtual scene. In some trials, we subtly shifted either the thrower or the midfield line on a soccer field to manipulate allocentric coding of the ball’s landing position. In both experiments, we were able to replicate classic findings from small-scale experiments and to generalize these results to different encoding tasks (perception vs. action) and response modes (reaching vs. walking-and-placing). Moreover, we found that participants preferably encoded the ball relative to the thrower when they had to intercept the ball, suggesting that the use of allocentric information is determined by the encoding task by enhancing task-relevant allocentric information. Our findings indicate that results previously obtained from memory-guided reaching are not restricted to small-scale movements, but generalize to whole-body movements in large-scale dynamic scenes.

在日常生活中，我们的大脑不断建立围绕我们周围物体的空间表示。许多研究已经调查了这些空间表示的性质。众所周知，我们在实时和以记忆为指导的运动中使用同心轴信息。大多数研究依赖于小型和静态实验，尚不清楚相似的范式是否在使用动态对象的更大范围内产生相同的结果。我们创建了一个虚拟现实任务，要求参与者编码由化身投掷的虚拟球的着陆位置。编码在任务性质上的不同之处在于，它要么纯粹是感知性的（“观察球在静止时着地的位置”，即实验1），要么涉及一个动作（“在球着陆之前用脚拦截球”），即实验2 ）。编码后，要求参与者将真实的球放置在虚拟场景中记住的着陆位置。在某些试验中，我们巧妙地移动了足球场上的投掷器或中场线，以操纵球着陆位置的同心轴编码。在两个实验中，我们都能够复制小规模实验的经典发现，并将这些结果推广到不同的编码任务（感知与行动）和响应模式（到达与行走与放置）。此外，我们发现参与者最好在必须拦截球时相对于投掷者对球进行编码，这表明，通过增强与任务相关的同心圆信息，可以由编码任务确定对同心圆信息的使用。