ABSTRACT
The study of spatial representation has intrigued scholars for decades. Developmental psychologists have examined age-related changes in emergent spatial representation. Geographers, architects, and planners also have studied representations of the environment in an effort to understand behavior in the environment. Missing from both these approaches has been a systematic examination of the reciprocal relationships between the physical environment itself and the representation of the environment. Representation not only influences behavior in the environment (Walsh, Krauss, & Regnier, 1981), but characteristics of the environment also influence the representation (Lynch, 1960). In this chapter a framework for articulating the reciprocal relationships between the characteristics of the environment and large-scale spatial cognition is presented.
