Acquisition of spatial knowledge in different urban areas: evidence from a survey analysis of adolescents

We herein explore the perception of the geographic environment and analyse the mechanisms that constrain the cognitive processing of spatial information in general. Our guiding theoretical background assumption is that the structure of the spatial environment is a cognitively robust and mutually constrained threefold system relating (1) cognitive topology (comprised of a path and place structure of spatial information and constrained by reference frame-based factors), (2) experience-based functional knowledge (including the effects of socio-economic factors, frequency and familiarity) and (3) linguistic representations (primarily encoded in the prepositional system of a natural language). Here, we focus on (2), i.e. the effect of functional knowledge on the process of acquiring spatial knowledge. We empirically tested adolescents aged 12–17 years to explore the interaction between frequency, familiarity and functional knowledge from a developmental point of view. The social factors we explore are precisely defined and parameterized in our results (exposure to a particular urban area, place of residence, gender, age and factors relating to the environmental and social quality of the local area). Our research shows that there are divergences between the so-called objective topology and the cognitive typology of the urban environment that are significantly constrained by intensity of interactions with environment, number of functionally significant places within particular area and age from a developmental perspective in terms of spatial knowledge acquisition.