Abstract
Spatial perception and cognitive mapping are two areas of research that invite comparison since they both involve fundamental geometric concepts, and researchers have applied psychophysical methods to examine spatial judgments in both domains. The first part of article discusses research that assesses the degree to which spatial judgments conform to various geometric axioms. In general, both spatial perception and cognitive maps violate many of the most fundamental geometric axioms, including metric axioms, compactness, the Desarguesian postulate, and free mobility. Of the two, cognitive maps show the most striking violations of even the most basic geometric concepts, including symmetry, transitivity, and Riemannian manifoldness.
The second and larger part of this article performs a meta-analysis on psychophysical judgments for size and distance, comparing judgments made in perception research to those found with cognitive maps. The most striking results are that cognitive maps produce much lower power function exponents and much lower coefficients of determination for size and distance estimation than perception does. The meta-analysis presented here also shows that a number of the same factors influence both types of distance estimates including judgment method, whether judgments occur inside or outside, and stimulus range. Cognitive mapping exponents also rise with acquisition time and decline with increasing environment size. Several multivariate analyses are performed to yield a set of general psychophysical equations to predict size and distance estimates.
