Abstract Humans tend to encode the environment by means of two types of spatial relations: coordinate (metric) and categorical (nonmetric). The present research contributes to methods for disentangling the contribution of categorical and coordinates spatial relations in sketch maps and investigates the role of familiarity with spatial information in accurate encoding of these spatial relations. The results of three experiments show that as familiarity with spatial layout increases, differences between categorical and coordinate spatial relations tend to decrease. Moreover, they reveal that the way in which spatial information has been acquired – through navigation or map study - affects performance. Navigation favours coordinate encoding, while map study favours categorical encoding. Finally, gender differences did not emerge when spatial information was acquired through navigation, but they were present in the case of map study acquisition. In conclusion, it seems possible to extract reliable and independent information on both categorical and coordinate spatial mental representations using sketch maps.

中文翻译：

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分类和坐标空间信息：它们可以在草图中解开吗？

摘要 人类倾向于通过两种类型的空间关系对环境进行编码：坐标（度量）和分类（非度量）。本研究有助于解决草图中分类和坐标空间关系的贡献的方法，并调查熟悉空间信息在这些空间关系的准确编码中的作用。三个实验的结果表明，随着对空间布局的熟悉程度增加，分类空间关系和坐标空间关系之间的差异趋于减小。此外，它们揭示了获取空间信息的方式——通过导航或地图研究——会影响性能。导航支持坐标编码，而地图研究支持分类编码。最后，通过导航获取空间信息时没有出现性别差异，但在获取地图研究的情况下却存在性别差异。总之，使用草图提取关于分类和坐标空间心理表征的可靠且独立的信息似乎是可能的。