Spatial cognition and reasoning

Perry W. Thorndyke

Published 1980

Summarizes several cognitive studies of spatial knowledge processing. The studies investigated the types of representation of spatial knowledge, the techniques individuals use to acquire knowledge from maps, and the differences between the knowledge acquired from maps and navigational experience. Three major conclusions emerge from these studies: (1) People encode several types of spatial knowledge in memory, including images of physical objects, memory of actions and procedures, symbolic abstractions of the environment (e.g., names, distances), and spatial maps. (2) Different types of spatial knowledge are optimal for different tasks (e.g., orienting oneself, estimating distances, reconstructing spatial relations among distant objects). (3) Individuals vary in their strategies and abilities for acquiring spatial knowledge.

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Thorndyke, Perry W., Spatial cognition and reasoning. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1980. https://www.rand.org/pubs/notes/N1333.html.
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