Cognitive mapping and spatial familiarity are intuitively intertwined. Cognitive mapping refers to our knowledge about the world around us, and the methods we use to store and us such information. The places we are most familiar with are inherently likely to be those best remembered. Spatial familiarity is though more multifarious than simply ’how well a place in known’ needing surrogate measures to become operational. These surrogates include name identification, locational knowledge, interactional experience, visual recognition and knowledge about places. Because of these definitional and operational problems the using spatial familiarity as a variable in cognitive mapping research is more complex than originally thought. This paper explores this potential multidimensional nature to discover how best to make spatial familiarity operational for cognitive mapping studies.