Acquiring spatial knowledge from different sources and perspectives: Abilities, strategies and representations.

In recent years our Memory and Learning lab at the University of Padua has conducted research projects, many of them inspired by Barbara Tversky’s work, to investigate the interactions between individual and environmental variables affecting performance in several spatial tasks: navigation, short-cut finding, map learning, and spatial text comprehension. A variety of methods and tools have been used to do so, from self-reports (questionnaires on sense of direction [SOD], strategies and preferences in spatial representations) to objective measures of spatial abilities and visuospatial working memory (VSWM). Our general goal has been to explore differences and similarities in spatial representations constructed from different sources (navigation, map inspection, spatial texts) and perspectives, and to shed light on whether and how SOD, spatial representation strategies and styles, spatial abilities, and VSWM work together in influencing performance in various spatial tasks. Studies on this topic originated a long time ago, in 1993, when the first author of this chapter presented a poster together with Cesare Cornoldi at the 34th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. It is there that we met Barbara Tversky (and a brilliant PhD student: Holly Taylor), and embarked on a long story of research exchanges and friendship that, some years later, came to involve the second author too. The present chapter is a sign of our grateful acknowledgment of how Barbara continues to inspire our work, and how she brought fresh perspectives to our lives.