Judging Spatial Relations from Memory

Representations and processes involved in judgments of spatial relations after route learning are investigated. The main objective is to decide which relations are explicitly represented and which are implicitly stored. Participants learned maps of fictitious cities by moving along streets on a computer screen. After learning, they estimated distances and bearings from memory. Response times were measured. Experiments 1 and 2 address the question of how distances along a route are represented in spatial memory. Reaction times increased with increasing number of objects along the paths, but not with increasing length of the paths. This supports the hypothesis that only distances between neighboring objects are explicitly encoded. Experiment 3 tested whether survey knowledge can emerge after route learning. Participants judged Euclidean distances and bearings. Reaction times for distance estimates support the hypotheses that survey knowledge has been developed in route learning. However, reaction times for bearing estimates did not conform with any of the predictions.