At the start of the 1970s, it was intellectually fashionable amongst behavioural geographers to investigate the significance of cognitive maps, and their impacts on people's spatial behaviour. Downs and Stea's book was probably the most influential overview of the field and brought together papers from almost all of the leading exponents of this kind of research. We have excerpted Chapter 1, which explores the dimensions of cognitive mapping, distinguishing between cartographic images and the cognitive constructs that are the focus of their attention. This conceptual piece is informed by a communications model of information transmission and explores processes and defines concepts underpinning research. The authors define the concepts of perception, cognition, attitude and preference, before explaining the differences between what people need to know and what they actually know. Amongst other concepts they focus on differences between locational and attribute information, the role of incomplete, distorted, schematised, and augmented cognitive maps, and some of the behavioural reasons for the mismatch between theory and practice. They conclude by urging further experimental investigation of behavioural evidence of cognitive mapping. Originally published in 1973: Chapter 1 in Roger M. Downs and David Stea (eds) Image and Environment: Cognitive Mapping and Spatial Behavior,

Cross-cultural arid developmental research on the untaught mapping abilities of children aged five through ten suggests that mapping behavior is a normal and important process in human development, and that map learning begins long before the child encounters formal geography and cartography. The results of this research may lead to new strategies in early geographic education and new insights on early geographic learning.

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We examined some potential causes of bias in geographic location estimates by comparing location estimates of North American cities made by Canadian, U.S., and Mexican university students. All three groups placed most Mexican cities near the equator, which implies that all three groups were influenced by shared beliefs about the locations of geographical regions relative to global reference points. However, the groups divided North America into different regions and differed in the relative accuracy of the estimates within them, which implies that there was an influence of culture-specific knowledge. The data support a category-based system of plausible reasoning, in which biases in judgments are multiply determined, and underscore the utility of the estimation paradigm as a tool in cross-cultural cognitive research.

We hypothesize that nearly all humans, in all cultures, acquire the ability to read and use map-like models in very early childhood, and that this ability is a fundamental part of human ecological adaptation, comparable in many ways to tool use. Evidence pertaining to this theory should be sought in three kinds of research: studies in differing cultures of the development of young children's ability to use map-like models; studies probing for evidence of maplike modeling across the ethnographic spectrum; and studies probing for evidence of the use of map-like models in prehistory. We are pursuing all three lines of research. However, our main focus thus far has been on the developmental dimension of the problem. Here, we report evidence that supports the universality hypothesis from seven empirical studies carried out on mapping abilities of three-to five-year-old children in several Western and non-Western cultures; we offer a general ecological theory of the development of mapping abilities, a theory that appears to explain the evidence elicited and accords with the universality hypothesis; and we discuss the implications of this work for early childhood education.