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When studying wayfinding in urban environments, researchers are often interested in obtaining measures of participants' survey knowledge, i.e., their estimate of distant locations relative to other places. Previous work showed that distance estimations are consistently biased when no direct route is available to the queried target or when participants follow a detour. Here we investigated whether a corresponding bias is manifested in two other popular measures of survey knowledge: a pointing task and a sketchmapping task. The aim of this study was to investigate whether there is a systematic bias in pointing/sketchmapping performance associated with the preferred route choice in an applied urban setting. The results were mixed. We found moderate evidence for the presence of a systematic bias, but only for a subset of urban locations. When two plausible routes to the target were available, survey knowledge estimates were significantly biased in the direction of the route chosen by the participant. When only one plausible route was available, we did not find a statistically significant pattern. The results may have methodological implications for spatial cognition studies in applied urban settings that might be obtaining systematically biased survey knowledge estimates at some urban locations. Researchers should be aware that the choice of urban locations from which pointing and sketchmapping are performed might systematically distort the results, in particular when two plausible but diverging routes to the target are visible from the location., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

From geographical point of view, the farms are organic parts of the rural territories. Their situation is double-faced, they are vulnerable because of their size and production capacity; but their opportunities in value creation based on local resources and leisure capacity can be transformed into advantages. The research aim was to have actual information about farms (abandoned level, infrastructure, farm types, development, European aid use, future prospects) and discover the mental cognition about farms through sketch maps made by the focus groups. Four focus groups (people living on farms, agriculture related people, and not related people subdivided to: rural and urban population) were involved. The differences of cognition can be observed on the drawings (elaboration, number of objects, and their relative location). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies on spatial cognition have rarely adopted a behaviorally objective approach for survey representations that may capture the Euclidean qualities of configurations. The current study integrates subjectively conventional coding and a recently developed objective Gardony Map Drawing Analyzer (GMDA) technique to link landmark and survey representations. The combined approach is able to present a more complete story. Participants were instructed to tour a real aquatic environment, which provided more ecologically valid results. Conventional analysis results revealed that the top two most commonly recalled and located landscape categories were lakes and a cascade due to their embedded sociopsychological meanings and physical salience. GMDA results provided quantitative measures regarding configurational outputs, angle accuracy, and distance accuracy. Based on these results, relative contributions of different measures to spatial knowledge were identified using the k-means method. From the two approaches, the results indicated that participants who were better at landmark recall led to a better global perspective of the research site. The study also points out that missing landmarks, which involve participants' loss of components in response to the target environment map, play critical roles in understanding configurations. In addition, directional information is more important than distance information in constructing spatial representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We tested the hypothesis that a route's memorability is dependent on the frequency with which people are exposed to visual landmarks. Undergraduates learned either a route through an urban area lacking visually salient features, or a route in a neighborhood with many shops and urban objects. They were then asked to recall the learned route in the form of route directions and sketch maps. The results showed higher recall performance for the richer environment. When presented with photographs depicting scenes along the route, participants exposed to the richer environment had higher recognition scores and shorter response times than the others. The data confirm the functional role of landmarks in route memory and wayfinding. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The mental images on which an individual bases spatial decisions are often distorted versions of real-world geography. Distortion in these images is studied by extracting paired distance estimates and by requesting a sketch of a place drawn from memory. Reliance upon either technique to elicit large-scale spatial in formation assumes that distortion in the cognitive map is not introduced by the technique (sketching or configuration) used to construct it. Both techniques have been used in this study to produce cognitive maps for a common set of landmarks in Seattle. Map distortions are analyzed and compared to determine that significant differences result from the technique used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]