ABSTRACT
Over the past forty years, since the publication of Kevin Lynch’s (1960) seminal text, The Image of the City, researchers from a number of disciplines, including psychology, geography, planning, anthropology, computer science, cognitive science, and neuro-psychology, have engaged in studies that seek to identify and understand how we think about and behave in geographic space; to determine how we can remember routes, learn new routes, make distance and direction estimates, and know where places are in relation to one another (Golledge and Stimson 1997; Kitchin and Freundschuh 2000). This research is termed cognitive mapping, and the focus of study has been on our cognitive map knowledge and on our ability to effectively process this knowledge; how we consciously, and more commonly, subconsciously, acquire, learn, think about and store data relating to our everyday geographic environment (Downs and Stea 1973). Cognitive map knowledge thus consists of information concerning spatial relations and data on environmental characteristics which reside within a space-time context, and allows people to successfully operate within a complex geographic environment and process environmental and geographic data.
