ABSTRACT
All too often a session chairman’s remarks are rightfully disregarded as an attempt to manufacture coherence among an amorphous collection of papers, and to praise progress where none is evident: in other words, he must pretend that the whole session is at least equal to the sum of its parts. In this instance, such pretence is unnecessary. These papers are as representative of the current state of the art in environmental cognition studies as one could expect from five unsolicited pieces of work, and, what is more important, indicative of some of the significant changes in methods, thinking, and objectives that the field is experiencing. In this third consecutive EDRA session devoted to environmental cognition, the obligatory hopes expressed by earlier participants are being answered, and we can find evidence of progress and achievements on three fronts, those of methodology, cumulative knowledge, and the link with environmental design.
