Cognitive mapping: knowledge of real-world distance and location information

A series of experiments investigated how information about geographic environments is processed. In the first experiment, response time to decide which of two pairs of states or buildings were physically closer in the real world increased as the ratio of the interpair distances approached one. The second experiment examined spatial memory for the interrelationships among states and buildings. Subjects' reaction time to determine the accuracy of relative spatial positions of triads of states was a linear function of the degree of triad rotation from the 0 degrees Cartesian plane of a standard U.S. map. No linear rotation function was reported for triad rotations of buildings. In Experiment 3 a group of subjects unfamiliar with the campus tested in Experiments 1 and 2 learned the location of the buildings from a map only. This group's data reflected a linear trend of reaction time with degree of building triad rotation, similar to results with states in Experiment 2. Perhaps when an environment is primarily learned by a map, knowledge of the interpositions of items in the environment is formed in the single perspective of the map. When the environment is primarily learned through direct experience, knowledge of interpositions of items is more flexible and is processed from many perspectives.