Knowledge of spatial relations: The determination of the relationship “nearest to”

After memorising the names and positions of a set of familiar towns, subjects were given the name of one of the towns followed by the name of a target town. The subjects' task was to state whether the given town was the nearest town in the memory set to the target. In three experiments analyses of reaction times suggested that subjects generate their responses by determining the distance from the given town to the target and comparing it with the distances of other towns to the target. The use of other methods, for example locating the nearest town on a mental map by scanning outward from the target and comparing it with the given town seem inconsistent with the data.