Constructing cognitive maps from sentences.

Three experiments investigated the construction of one- and two-dimensional cognitive maps from presented sentences containing information about adjacent pairs of items in the map. Sentences were of the form The item is X of the item or The item has the item on its X side when items were high-frequency nouns and X was the adjective north, south, east, or west. Hypotheses derived from three-term series and linear ordering work were tested. Increasing the number of dimensions and end anchors did not affect performance, although increasing the number of items lowered performance. Construction was best when the ordering was complete rather than partial, when each incoming sentence presented new information that could be immediately integrated with previously presented information, when new items could be added to the end rather than the beginning of a stored representation, and when the sentence adjective was congruent with the placement of the new item in the map. This last result appears to depend to some extent on the representational strategy adopted by participants.