Cognitive Mapping in a Complex Building

Abstract

The Health Sciences Centre is a five-story hospital in which each floor is designed with a unique configuration. There are no main corridors in the hospital, nor any corridors that run the complete length of the hospital. Rooms are not rectangular and fail to follow any set pattern. Consequently it is easy to become disoriented in this building. The series of studies reported in this article examined the cognitive mapping systems of student nurses who had worked in the hospital for various periods of time. After inspecting several different measures, it was concluded that the student nurses had failed to form "survy"- type cognitive maps of the building even after traversing it for two years. A control experiment was tested, using naive subjects who were first asked to memorize floor plans of the building. These naive subjects performed significantly better on objective measures of cognitive mapping than did the nurses with two years' experience working at the hospital. It was concluded that mental representations of survey maps do not develop automatically in the complex spatial environment.