Janine eber maps London: Individual dimensions of cognitive imagery

Abstract In 1971 we accompanied a group of American teenagers on their first trip to Europe, collecting from them more than 300 maps of London, Paris and Rome sketched according to the protocols established in Environmental A , an experimental mapping language. Heretofore, with the exception of an exploratory comparison of individual and aggregate imagery ( Beck and Wood, 1976b ), we have described the results of group analyses of these sketch maps ( Wood, 1973 ; Beck and Wood, 1976a ; Wood and Beck, 1976 ). These, however, obscure not only the real behaviors of actual individuals (as called for by, inter alia , Canter, 1977 , p.67; Gale, 1983 , p.71 and Walmsley, 1988 , p. 50), but also the full power of Environmental A to illuminate the development of individual map surfaces , with the attendant improvement this engenders in the understanding of cognitive development in the individual. Here, then, we take an essentially empirical look at a single teenager's maps of a single novel environment, as sketched over the period of a week, augmented by both predicted and remembered images. At the same time we take this opportunity to probe the relationship of the formal properties of the mapped image to its evaluative, affective, ultimately meaningful dimensions, aspects of the image Environmental A has proven peculiarly useful in elucidating ( Spencer and Dixon, 1983 , and Walmsley, 1988 , p. 51; but also see Buttenfield, 1986 and Canter and Donald, 1987 , p. 1286).