ABSTRACT
As people move about the environment, they acquire knowledge about patterns of their own movement and about spatial relations among places in the world. This knowledge is encoded and stored in memory, allowing people to find the places again in an efficient manner and to communicate the locations to others. As they sit, stand, and travel in environments, people acquire spatial knowledge “directly” via perceptual-motor interaction with the world. But spatial knowledge is also acquired “indirectly” via external representations of the world and its spatial layout. We refer to these direct and indirect ways of learning spatial relations in the world as alternative sources for knowledge acquisition. For both theoretical and practical reasons, it is interesting to ask how the spatial knowledge acquired through different sources is similar and how it is different. To what degree are memory content, structure, and process similar or different when based on different sources, and why?
