There are two main types of spatial knowledge that are acquired when people engage in spatial learning, procedural knowledge and configural knowledge . Procedural knowledge can further be divided into knowledge about landmarks or reference points and route knowledge. Landmarks or reference points refer to distinctive features of a spatial layout that are used as a basis for making judgements about various aspects of the environment. Route knowledge refers to the spatio-temporal relations between specific environmental features. Finally configural knowledge refers to map like structures that include information about the interrelationships among locations. Some developmental evidence suggests that encoding and retrieval of landmark knowledge may precede other sorts of spatial knowledge.

In the process of learning a new environment different groups of people and different individuals are going through these steps in different ways or they treat the environmental information differently. For instance females are more inclined then males to give route descriptions. Males on the other hand prefere to give an environment a configural description. Our way of handling environmental information also changes with age. Older people are less inclined to use configural knowledge and the landmarks they use consists of more personal and evalutive statements about the scenes.