Switching between Route and Survey Perspectives Paul U. Lee & Barbara Tversky Stanford University Two experiments examined perspective switching in comprehension and retrieval of spatial information. Participants read route or survey descriptions of environments. For half of the descriptions, the perspective was switched during comprehension. True/false verification sentences followed from both perspectives. Switching perspective increased reading times but increased verification times only for survey sentences. This suggests that perspective switching exacts a cost in comprehension, but that the cost dissipates after information retrieval, especially for route descriptions. The second study examined whether viewpoint or terms of reference accounted for switching costs. Switching terms of reference slowed reading times more than switching viewpoint. Together, the experiments suggest that switching perspective plays a role in comprehension that diminishes with repeated retrieval. They also point to a fundamental asymmetry between route and survey perspectives, one that depends on orientation.