Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2025 Mar 22;15(4):404.
doi: 10.3390/bs15040404.

Spatial Compression in Memory: How Repeated Walks on Familiar Routes Shorten Perceived Distance

Kyung Wook Seo  1 , Hyung-Sook Lee  2 , Joo Young Kim  3
Affiliations

Spatial Compression in Memory: How Repeated Walks on Familiar Routes Shorten Perceived Distance

Kyung Wook Seo et al. Behav Sci (Basel). .

Abstract

Many experiments on distance perception have revealed that there is a difference between perceptual distance and objective distance. It has been accepted that a route with more memorable features will make its perceived distance longer. This study revisited this information storage model and examined how estimations change by repeated journeys in a university campus. While the outcome confirms the existing hypothesis, an unexpected pattern of distance compression by time was found. Spending more years on the campus, the estimation tended to decrease. The rate of decrease was bigger and more distinctively gradual for architecture and female students than non-architecture and male students. At the end, a cognitive threshold hypothesis was suggested as a possible model to explain the complexity of distance perception. Before reaching it, the distance grows along with the knowledge on a route but beyond the point of knowledge saturation, it begins to compress.

Keywords: cognitive threshold; distance compression; information storage model; repeated journey; spatial perception.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Two routes on K University campus.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Distance estimations by 1st year architecture students.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Distance estimations by 1st year architecture students.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Individual estimations by architecture students (by year groups).
Figure 5
Figure 5
Individual estimations by non-architecture students (males and females).
Figure 6
Figure 6
Individual estimations by non-architecture students (year groups).
Figure 7
Figure 7
Estimations of non-architecture students compared by year groups and gender.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Arslan A. R., Dazkir S. S. Technical drafting and mental visualization in interior architecture education. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. 2017;11(2):15. doi: 10.20429/ijsotl.2017.110215. - DOI
    1. Berkowitz M., Gerber A., Thurn C. M., Emo B., Hoelscher C., Stern E. Spatial abilities for architecture: Cross sectional and longitudinal assessment with novel and existing spatial ability tests. Frontiers in Psychology. 2020;11:609363. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.609363. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Bilda Z., Gero J. Reasoning with internal and external representations: A case study with expert architects. In: Sun R., editor. Proceedings of the annual meeting of cognitive science society. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates; 2006. pp. 1020–1026.
    1. Boltz M. G., Kupperman C., Dunne J. The role of learning in remembered duration. Memory & Cognition. 1998;26:903–921. - PubMed
    1. Coeterier J. F. Cues for the perception of size of space in landscape. Journal of Environmental Management. 1994;42:333–347. doi: 10.1006/jema.1994.1076. - DOI

LinkOut - more resources