Evidence of hierarchies in cognitive maps

Previous research suggested that the apparent hierarchical organization of landmarks in an environment will influence subjects’ judgments about spatial characteristics of that environment. We extended this previous work to a natural environment that has no predetermined, well-defined hierarchical structure. Using an algorithm that generates a hierarchy of landmarks from recall protocols, we constructed hypothesized clusterings of landmarks for a set of subjects familiar with the space. Then we tested these hypothesized clusters in a series of tasks, all of which required judgments about distances in the space. The results of these tests suggest that subjects do cluster landmarks on the basis of nonspatial attributes, and that the clusters have consequences for performance in various tasks that require access to spatial information.

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