1 PAPER PRESENTED IN THE XIV IPA WORLD CONGRESS - LISBON 24th of June 1999 A. Arez & C. Neto “The Study of Independent Mobility and Perception of the Physical Environment in Rural and Urban Children” The innumerable social changes that have been occurring in this century, mainly in the last decades, have been leading to big changes in the lifestyle of the population. From the most relevant changes we emphasise two: the generalization of female work (with mothers going out to work) and the changes occurred in work itself. Work is no longer done at home but outside people’s houses; it does not take place in a private environment but in specific places for that purpose. Consequently, the necessity of going out to work as well as of spending most part of the day away from home has increased. Along with these social changes, the quality of the physical environment has been decreasing, the urban environment has been growing worse and natural areas have progressively been replaced by roads, motorways and by badly planned construction. This study is essentially about the quality of the physical environment’s and its influence upon children’s independent mobility and upon the perception of the affordances of their physical environment. As far as children’s Independent Mobility is concerned, a topic which constitutes the first issue to be analysed, we propose to characterise children’s autonomy in their daily life through the study of their level of autonomy in their daily routine on one hand, and the study of the factors that influence their independent mobility. The concept of independent mobility is closely related to children’s autonomy in the exploration of the available physical environment. According to the several authors we have studied, the independent mobility allows the child: - to develop cognitive representations of the environment;