The Construction of Mental Maps Based on a Fragmentary View of Physical Maps: Picture and Text Materials

Abstract

Participants acquired spatial knowledge of a fictitious island by studying either (a) a complete physical map, (b) a sequence of part maps each showing the outline of the island and a subset of the landmarks, or (c) a sequence of sentences each describing a part map. During test, they verified the direction between 2 landmarks. Spatial knowledge in the fragment condition was as high as in the complete map condition, and both were better than the text group. Response times showed a distance effect. Additionally, spatial relations really presented were judged faster than inferred relations. The author replicated these results in a condition in which only relative spatial information could be used. These results suggest that simultaneity is not critical for obtaining a map advantage in spatial learning and that the mental representation of the map is structured. This document contains the 27 part maps and the corresponding text sentences that were used in the conditions (b) and (c) described above.