Use of contextual information in the formation of cognitive maps

To investigate the importance of context and presentation of serial order of information in the formation of cognitive maps, subjects were shown slides of pairwise relationships between items and then asked to construct a map. Two context conditions were used: a spatial condition in which the item pairs appeared in the same location on the screen as they would appear in a slide of the entire map and a nonspatial condition in which all item pairs appeared centered on the screen. Information order was either chain, in which new information could be immediately added to the representation, or nonchain, in which brief storage was required. The results indicated that both spatial context and chain order enhance performance. In addition, spatial information reduces the effect of serial order, perhaps by allowing subjects to relate new information to the context itself if they cannot relate it to previous information.