Memorable Places on Campuses Across Generations
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Abstract
This study explores the method of recording memorable places and highlights the peak recollection spots of college town universities across generations--prospective, present current, and past students. The chosen campus areas are the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Cornell University. Ninety participants produced mental maps based on memory, including landmarks, meaningful places, paths, landscapes, and anything they associated with the campus. Following Lynch’s methods, elements from sketch maps were mainly were landmarks (87%). Current students had a higher percentage of buildings recalled, but fewer landscapes recalled than prospective students and alumni. Adapting from Appleyard’s methods, over four-fifths of student populations provided spatial dominant maps, which indicated more substantial stages of spatial knowledge. Categorizing by functional aspects, the highest recollection of all students was landscape and roads (28%), exceeding academic buildings (25%). The researcher counted an element from sketch maps that demonstrated at least one stage of spatial knowledge development, and extracted and transformed it into digital maps. The collective memory-significant maps presented different patterns of recall frequency among student subgroups of the three student generations. The top three places with the highest intensities were iconic buildings and adjacent landscapes at the core campus. Memory intensity did not diminish equally as distance increased from the central zone. The Hot Spot Analysis, utilizing the Getis-Ord-Gi* statistic and inverse distance weighting (IDW), revealed different patterns of hot spots among generations. A landscape landmark served as a memorable hot spot in every subpopulation of all three generational groups. This innovative method could serve as an additional tool in bridging the gap between practical and theoretical knowledge, enabling the recording of intangible memory aspects into databases and measurable plans. Other campuses could implement the procedure and include the memory-significant assessment to design institutional environments that meet diverse student perceptions.
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