FURTHER EVIDENCE FOR THE HIERARCHICAL REPRESENTATION OF SPATIAL INFORMATION

This study sought evidence of a multileveled representation of spatial information going beyond cluster effects. Subjects learned a map that embodied an intrinsic hierarchy: equidistant houses could lie on the same street; on different streets in the same township; or in differen t townships. Both direct estimates and map drawings revealed progressi ve increases in distance judgements with increases in hierarchical sep aration. Although response times for map label recognition illustrated that houses in the same township prime one another more than houses f rom different townships, the degree of priming did not differ for the two types of within-township house pairs. A hierarchical analysis perf ormed on subjects' map label recall protocols revealed clustering was influenced by semantic factors as well as by physical features of the map.