ABSTRACT
Researchers who wish to study the nature of people’s memory and knowledge of spatial information have worried off and on for years about what methods to use to accomplish this goal. Initially, methods to study spatial knowledge of environments generally involved asking subjects to draw sketch maps or to make models of specified areas (e.g., Lynch, 1960). These tasks have the advantage of producing spatial representations as products directly, with points related to each other simultaneously in two or three dimensions. But because people seem to differ in their graphic or modeling ability, and because freely drawn maps can be difficult to classify or study quantitatively (e.g., Walsh, Krauss, & Regnier, 1981), investigators have been ingenious in seeking other means of studying spatial knowledge. Several techniques have been used. People can be asked to reconstruct spatial information, that is, to place a pair or array of objects where they belong. The framework for this task can be the original space (be it a room or other spatial framework) or another framework, on a same or different scale as the original one. People can be asked to estimate distances, in absolute or ratio terms, or in terms of travel time. They can be asked to rank-order distances or locations; to move around in real or imagined space and find detours, new routes, and shortcuts; or to point to locations from a variety of positions, allowing inference about location through projective convergence (triangulation). Many of these last methods have been evolved to get around the difficulties raised by the graphic demands of sketching and modeling tasks.
