Representations and processes involved in judgments of spatial relations after route learning are investigated. The main objective
is to decide which relations are explicitly represented and which are implicitly stored. Participants learned maps of fictitious
cities by moving along streets on a computer screen. After learning, they estimated distances and bearings from memory. Response
times were measured. Experiments 1 and 2 address the question of how distances along a route are represented in spatial memory.
Reaction times increased with increasing number of objects along the paths, but not with increasing length of the paths. This
supports the hypothesis that only distances between neighboring objects are explicitly encoded. Experiment 3 tested whether
survey knowledge can emerge after route learning. Participants judged Euclidean distances and bearings. Reaction times for
distance estimates support the hypotheses that survey knowledge has been developed in route learning. However, reaction times
for bearing estimates did not conform with any of the predictions.