ABSTRACT
As an interdisciplinary research area, the study of the development of macrospatial cognition is facilitated by the sharing of concepts and techniques from different groups of researchers. Considerable progress has been made toward understanding how knowledge of the spatial attributes of large-scale environments is acquired and how such knowledge affects human behavior, and much of this progress has been stimulated by an exchange of information among psychologists, geographers, sociologists, and urban planners. However, not everything transmitted across disciplinary boundaries has contributed to progress. In fact, some concepts with widespread application have actually had the effect of impeding advances in the area. These weak links provided the impetus for this chapter. The chapter has two objectives. The first is to advance the proposition that the concept of the cognitive map has become a weak link in the sense that it provides an ineffective interface between the study of the development of macrospatial cognition and the experimental study of human cognition. The second is to suggest a number of theoretical constructs that may prove to be of greater heuristic value than the cognitive map concept has been.
