Knowing about Environmental Knowing

Abstract

This paper reviews the 15 years of concentrated research on environmental cognition, including recent developments in theory construction. Included are discussions on the content of environmental representations, cognitive mapping, environmental meaning and symbolism, individual and group differences, eplanatory variables, differences due to characteristics of the physical environment, and the role of environmental cognition in urban spatial behavior. It is argued that people remember buildings less for their architectural form than for their use significance, that people conceive of cities in terms of basic dichotomies of human experiences, that environmental meaning and symbolism are more im-portant in experience than concrete aspects of orientation and cognitive mapping, that developmental changes occur in a stage-sequence pattern, that with increasing mobility peoples images of the environment shift from social and physical conceptions to symbolic conceptions, and that a complete explanation of environmental cognition must take into account both internal organismic variables and external environmental variables. Finally, a framework for organizing existing findings is proposed and new lines of research are suggested.