Understanding the spatial knowledge of freshmen and sophomores about their university campus: A case study from Jimei University, Xiamen, China

The influence of environmental familiarity on spatial knowledge development in the context of campuses and their surrounding environments has been well documented. However, existing studies have rarely stressed the distinction between the architectural styles of a campus and its surrounding environment. This study thus targets a campus with a historical architectural style that contrasts strongly with the surrounding modern environment, to gain a fresh view on how spatial knowledge develops with environmental familiarity on such a unique campus. This study recruited 30 freshmen and 28 sophomores to complete landmark selection, route sketching, and distance estimation tasks used to measure their spatial knowledge. The results mainly revealed that spatial knowledge developed by freshmen and sophomores stayed at a similar level as no significant differences were detected. As such, the key implication of this study is that spatial knowledge could be developed to the largest cognitive extent within a short period (i.e., 1.5 months) after students have entered a new campus in which the architectural style contrasts strongly with its surrounding environment. Increased environmental familiarity did not significantly promote their spatial knowledge development as sophomores with about an added year of campus stay performed similarly to freshmen.