BACKGROUND

Scientific curiosity about how people create images of the space they inhabit is not a new topic. Since the early twentieth century, geographers such as Gulliver (1908) and Trowbridge (1913) have been interested in studying how people represented large scale environments internally (Pol, 2006; Evans, 1980). Nonetheless, the experimental study of mental maps would not begin until half-way through the twentieth century, in the field of cognitive psychology. Tolman (1948) used the term cognitive map to describe the way in which rats and, by analogy, humans behaved in the environment. After Tolman’s experiments, the study of cognitive maps was taken up again in the late fifties by Lynch (1960), the first author to use the concept of mental maps and the technique of sketching to study the representation that inhabitants formed of their city (Fischer, 1992). Although this work has been criticised for establishing a marked physical determinism of the images of the space, it should be recognized that it was original work that presented both an innovative methodology and a means of analysing the representation of urban space, and thus motivated a series of investigations into the city in different domains: urbanism, architecture, psychology, sociology, geography, etc.(Kitchin y Jackson, 1998). Subsequently, with the development of the cognitive sciences, the concept of “cognitive maps” received systematized theoretical treatment (Downs & Stea, 1973; Downs, 1977). The formation of mental maps and their function are analysed as intra-individual cognitive processes, as ways of treating all sorts of information related to space. The studies developed from this standpoint have given rise to current environmental cognition.