Spatial Memory

Spatial memory is the system responsible for remembering where things are, both absolute locations and the relationships between them. O'Keefe and Nadel's (1978) cognitive map theory proposed that the hippocampus builds an internal, allocentric representation of an environment's layout, a map-like structure that supports navigation and location recall independent of the observer's own viewpoint. Human short-term spatial memory, the kind used to hold a small layout in mind for a few seconds rather than to navigate a full environment, draws on this same underlying system and is what most competitive spatial-recall tasks in gaming actually demand.

Reference: O'Keefe & Nadel, 1978. The NeuroRank implementation holds the canonical form and scales interference via task-irrelevant stimulus density.

1. Recalling where wards or vision were placed on a previous pass through the map, without needing to look again.
2. Reconstructing an opponent's likely position from a mental map built out of footstep and gunfire audio cues alone.
3. Remembering an item or objective spawn location on a map layout seen only once or twice before.

NeuroRank's Memory module runs a 3x3 grid recall task directly on this skill: players view a sequence of spatial positions and then reproduce it from memory, with sequence length and correct-position count converted into the Working Memory dimension score.