Spatial Mental Models Derived from Survey and Route Descriptions

In four experiments, subjects read route or survey descriptions of naturalistic environments and then answered verbatim or inference questions from both perspectives and drew maps of the environments. In all studies, subjects were faster and more accurate to verbatim than to inference questions, suggesting that verbatim questions are verified against a representation of the text of the descriptions. Subjects were as fast and accurate to inference questions from the read perspective as from the new perspective, suggesting that inference questions are verified against a representation of the situation described by the text. Map drawings were very accurate for both description types. A separate group of subjects studied maps instead of descriptions, and their performance was comparable to that of description subjects on all tasks. Readers apparently form the same spatial mental models capturing the spatial relations between landmarks from both survey and route descriptions, and from maps.