ASSESSMENT OF CONFIGURATIONAL KNOWLEDGE OF NATURALLY-ACQUIRED AND ARTIFICIALLY-ACQUIRED LARGE-SCALE SPACE

The present study reports on two studies designed to explore subjects' performance in learning and accessing knowledge of artificial- and re al-world environments. Experiment 1 established norms for supporting m aterials used in Experiment 2. Subjects in Experiment 2 learned an art ificial (computer-based) environment that was either randomly- or prot otypically-configured, then performed several tasks intended to assess their configurational knowledge of the environment. The results showe d that subjects were able to derive configurational knowledge from eit her the random or prototypical configuration. However, configurational knowledge was better in the random condition than in the prototypical condition. It was also found that subjects' configurational knowledge was, in general, functionally similar to their knowledge of a real-wo rld environment. Multidimensional scaling was used of distance-estimat ion data to reconstruct recognizable representations of the artificial environments from the data. Finally, no effect was found for the sche ma-expectancy of sites on the acquisition of configurational knowledge .