Elsevier Editorial System(tm) for Journal of Environmental Management Manuscript Draft

This study employs an experiment investigating cognitive mapping of fifth grade
children living in a remote village environment, wherein characteristics of the landscape
included paths, landmarks, nodes, edges, and districts. Two aspects of analysis were salient
in this study. First, important landscape characteristics and their frequency of appearance in
the cognitive maps were tabulated and illustrated as a layout map. Second, inaccurate
cognitive maps were structurally analyzed to account for any incompleteness, distortions,
and augmentation of actual environments found in some map samples. Focus on gender
differences in children’s environmental cognition in terms of symbolic representation skills
utilized in cognitive mapping is of special interest in this case study. Results confirm
Piaget’s theory that older children, aged ten or more, begin to use projective and Euclidean
concepts. Furthermore, boys used a greater variety of symbols to represent a particular
landscape characteristic, a cultural temple, than did the girls. Finally, we hypothesize that the
‘hunter-gatherer’ social divisions of labor between men and women in the village’s early
historical social structure, is consequentially related to gender discrepancies in cognitive
mapping symbolic representation skills, in non-English speaking children.