This has been the topic of extensive study. This is called a procedural representation. So long as people restrict their movements to familiar paths between set points procedural representations are all that they really need to get along. However, with experience, some people develop surveyor's representations of the space about them. The study of these distortions and biases in people s cognitive representation of a large-scale space is the third body of literature which is directly relevant to our efforts.
People also exhibit systematic errors based on partitioning a space into subregions.
We are interested in how these biases and heuristics manifest themselves in spatial layouts learned in virtual environments. Developing surveyor level representations from real explorations is a difficult task. As Infield noted, there are very wide individual differences in related tasks. Individual differences are also noticed in actual environmental studies, outside of the laboratory. It follows that some people, if they are satisfied with their procedural knowledge of an area, simply never take the trouble to develop surveyor's representations if a more easily acquired procedural representation is sufficient to let them go about their daily business.