Rapid development of cognitive maps in people with visual impairments when exploring novel geographic spaces

'Cognitive' map is a term that refers to a person's environmental knowledge. Anyone experiencing a new environment will, over time, develop a cognitive representation of that environment, including information derived from that environment (e.g., about places, routes and spatial relationships) and information about personal experiences (e.g. memories about events at locations and attitudes towards places). There is now a great deal of research into the cognitive maps of sighted people (see Golledge, 1999; Kitchin & Freundschuh, 2000; Kitchin & Blades, in press), but there is comparatively little research into the cognitive maps of people with visual impairments.