A symposium on "Environmental Cognition and Forming Environments" was held on November 14, 1992, at Tokyo University in commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the Man-Environment Research Association. The theme refers to the dual function of human environmental adaptation. Presentations were made under three subthemes: "Spaces for Personal Interaction", "School Environments as Life Space", and "Locomotion in Space". The discussions addressed several fundamental issues. First, forming environments means the formation of socio-physical entities, including human activities, and not merely creating built environments. Second, as was explicit in all the studies presented, environmental cognition has a function in integrating environment and behavior. Third, as suggested in the study proposal of the relations between environmental structures and acquired spatial schemata, the comparative study of driving and walking, and the spatial learning studies of the visually handicapped, contextual constraints of environmental cognition are bases of variety and creativity in forming environments. Fourth, effects of adaptation and changes in coping with experiences in the areas of interpersonal distance and crowding demonstrate the dynamic characteristics of environmental cognition. Further studies are expected,since the role of environmental cognition in forming environments is complex.

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This study investigates the nature of the formation and the perception of personal space by experiments and field observations, and aims at providing a psychological and behavioral basis for environmental design. The spatial distances and the angles of orientation between people affect and motivate human behavior. Motivation forms personal space around a person heterogeneously. Personal space is characterized by "personal territorial field" and reference domains. The "personal territorial field" is defined as the potential energy field of the subject's inclination to move away from the object. By the usage of demonstrative pronouns, 'KORE','SORE', and 'ARE', the surrounding space of a person can be divided into three reference domains. The interpersonal distance during conversation or queuing in a public space is constantly maintained to recognise the existence and the invasion of the other's personal space, and the interpersonal distance in the queuing affords 'waiting'. Space affords a certain behavior and the interpersonal distance affords a certain social relation or comunication. The dimension of the personal space is practically constant. This study aims at clarifying the absolute scale of people's spatial sense and providing a common language among designers and users through the spatial nature of personal space.

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What are the determinants of spacing? This article discusses the question on the study of personal space and crowding. Personal space have an anisotropic structure. Some determinants of anisotropy are visual factors such as eye-contact, and cognitive factors such as perceived threat. Especially, perceived threat is a very important factor in spacing. When we recognize that the other person is a threat to our self-esteem, we have a long interpersonal distance. In this way, we protect the "self". Determinants of crowding are stimulus overload and behavioral constraint or interference. In addition, personal experiences are important determinants, because we perceive the situation, that will occur based on our experience. For space design, it is necessary to know "social spatial schema". Personal space is overt behavior based on personal schema and a discrepancy between schema and real behavior yield crowding.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate children's cognitive maps of school buildings. Sketch-map, placings of specific locations of floor plan, and projective convergence technique were employed to externalize children's cognitive maps. The subjects were second, third, and fifth graders. Some of the second graders' maps seem to be as accurate as the fifth graders' ones in the placings of specific locations. There were some charasteristic errors in cognitive maps represented by sketch-map and placings of specific locations. In one school building, the block slanting at 45 degree angle was distorted to be at right angle and pararell in about 30 children's cognitive maps. In the other school building, about 10 children's sketct-maps indicated rotated distortions. However, the children who showed some errors in sketch-maps and the placings of specific locations relatively, produced accurate cognitive maps from projective convergence technique.

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The present study examined implications of a new theoretical concept of group space which was applied to three environmental settings, i.e., school buildings, a playground of a kindergarten and University cafeteria. In this attempt, basic principles and theoretical concepts of a social ecological approach developed by Binder (1972) and Stokols' (1987) notion of group x place transaction were applied and elaborated to the study of educational space. The social ecological approach was formulated as a dynamic perspective on the transaction between physical settings and group dynamic processes with several analytic concepts. They include groups space, socio-petal, socio-fugal space, behavioral settings, public, semi-public, private space, and temporal organization of space. From three pilot studies it was revealed and suggested that 1) school buildings had differentiated and segmented multi-faceted group space depending on different subsets of social groups (class, grade and student body), 2) in a University cafeteria male and female groups exhibited different seat-taking behavior and rules for maintaining group-space and coordinated eating and socializing behavior within the group space, and 3) a playground in a kindergarten was composed of some thirty-eight behavior settings that provided different environmental affordance for the three age groups and contained particular set of activity patterns in the use of physical settings. The implications of a social ecological dimension in educational settings and in other living environment at large were explicated in terms of their functions in regulating group processes and users' transactions with the environment. A conceptual model dealing with hidden dimensions of space as ethnomethod was finally proposed.

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In car-oriented societies, the image of the city" for the drivers could be the important factors to enhance the quality of urban landscape. Also, for urban transportation planning, environmental psychology focusing on car drivers would become more important when intelligent devices for traffic become more popular. In this paper, the possibility of the studies of drivers' cognitive maps and their behavior from the viewpoint of urban transportation planning is reviewed. And, the psychological experiment which compared the cognitive maps of drivers and pedestrians is summarized.

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This article proposes two hypothetical psychological frameworks, namely full-size environmental cognition and objectified environmental cognition, for human travel to distant points. The spatial properties of an environment are measured by the human scale, and are then taken into the sensory-motor space. This realistic cognitive process is named full-size environmental cognition in this article. The process may be symbolized by a psychological elastic string that expands and contracts in proportion to the distance and the direction between the human body and its surrounding objects. Through the process of objectifying an environment, the spatial properties of the environment are separated from the body. The result of this makes symbolic use of environmental information. The process is named objectified environmental cognition. Human travel is composed of the interaction of these two psychological frameworks, as exemplified by Micronesian navigation and blind people's orientation and mobility.

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Japan has almost completely gone to ashes during the World War II. It has striven to recover from the damage it suffered, and has experienced extensive changes in various aspects. Those changes are most remarkable in recent years, which we can perhaps call a metamorphosis. Past values are being discarded, and various new ideas are emerging. Is it however right to say that we are moving toward a new era? Or are we just losing the guidepost that has long directed us? As regards our research accomplishments, have we succeeded in changing the environment in compliance with what we had found and proposed? Or is it just that we have not yet succeeded in finding effective alternatives to tradition? Present paper attempts to examine the issue from several distinctive viewpoints, and suggests possible alternatives for solution. It will first discuss the social aspect, the aging of Japanese population, then go into the issue of changing the built environment, and finally examine the possible solutions through the change of educational system in architecture, notably computerization.

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