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

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.