Abstract
According to environment and behavior theories, individuals in their first years of cognitive development enter a world full of environmental stimuli motivating them to perceive and learn. As a result of many perceptual processes, people convert and transfer perceptual information to their cognitive schemata. The prominent researcher Piaget (1955), who analyzed the perceptual processes of children through cognitive development stages based on age, mainly studied the way that a child perceives the environment within a constructive approach. One of the methods of revealing constructed and stored data in the memory is through the analysis of cognitive maps that children have drawn as they each uniquely perceive the environment and construct specific cognitive schema. Additionally, Lynch (1960) contributes to the theory of perception with the idea that if an urban part has a strong imageable character in terms of paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks, one can orient oneself easily when influenced by the synthesis of perceptual processes. Some other scholars have also been investigating how cognitive maps can be analyzed within the theory of space syntax (Zheng and Weimin, 2010; Zimring and Dalton, 2003; Haq and Girotto, 2003; Kim and Penn, 2004). In this sense, this article aims to contribute to both the methodology through the analysis of cognitive maps by using justified permeability graphs within the theory of space syntax and to the understanding of how the perception of children differs depending on gender and socioeconomic status. This includes a case study of children aged 11 who have drawn their home and nearby surroundings as part of Çanakçıoğlu’s research (2011).
