Investigating the Syntax Line: Configurational Properties and Cognitive Correlates

Space Syntax research has had significant success over the years and has served to illustrate the importance of configurational measures; especially those that take into account all the spaces in a system. Here, assumptions of axial lines as elementary spatial units have been overwhelming. Although based on a theoretical construct of visibility, this postulation has rarely been extended to perception or cognition and has given rise to questions about geometric and metric considerations. The research presented here was carried out in three large urban hospitals. In them, 128 volunteers performed ‘open searches’ where they attempted to become familiar with the hospital, ‘directed searches’ where they sought specific locations and various cognitive mapping tasks such as pointing to locations that were not within sight and sketching the hospital’s main corridors and routes. The hospitals themselves were analyzed through conventional syntax measures of axial lines and a segmented version