This Accomplishment-Based Renewal award will enable Professor Golledge and his collaborators to continue their research on how children and adults acquire, process, and store information about new geographical environments. The purpose of this research is to determine how people acquire the knowledge they need to navigate in cities and other areas. Geographical knowledge acquisition and use for navigation is analyzed in both field and laboratory settings. The previous work on this topic conducted by Professor Golledge and his research team is highly regarded. It has increased our understanding of how people identify landmarks, learn routes, and integrate such knowledge into mental images of neighborhoods and cities. This award will permit the investigators to elaborate those understandings. Research findings resulting from this project have important implications for theories and models of how children and adults learn about spatial relationships generally and how they come to mentally visualize local and larger areas.
