Cognitive Maps and Spatial Behaviour: Process and Products

International Journal of …, 1999

Journal of Interpretation, 2007

Interpretive centers are well-known sources of geographic information—providing visitors with maps and facts about noteworthy places. Yet research on the effectiveness of interpretation in conveying geographic information is limited. Managing natural and cultural resources creates a need to communicate to the public about these places at both small and large scales. This raises the question of how people perceive different types of spaces and how they learn geographic and spatial information. This paper reviews the literature on spatial cognition, providing a theoretical and empirical basis to suggest strategies for interpretation. The recommendations of this paper are to: 1) design geographic interpretation around the three components of spatial knowledge; 2) create interpretive maps by blending the principles of map and exhibit design; and 3) provide visitors with multiple opportunities to learn about a geographic setting. Maps have considerable potential as tools for connecting visitors to the meaning of places.

This article examines the development of conceptual schemata of environment-behaviour interaction since behavioural geography's inception in the late 1960s. Although these schemata have developed since then, they have remained naive and in many cases conceptually weak, lacking psychological 'depth'. It is argued that this is one of the prime reasons why behavioural geography failed to achieve academic 'take-off. Ways to increase the integrity of cognitive mapping research are examined by developing and implementing an integrative conceptual schema. This schema draws together five contemporary theories concerning cognitive map knowledge's content, structure and form, the learning strategies used to acquire such knowledge and the processes of spatial thought, and interweaves them with basic transactional theory to produce a more detailed schema of spatial thought and behaviour. It is argued that this schema, by combining contemporary theories into a more complete whole, advances transactionalism by explicitly detailing the mental processes that are used in environment-behaviour interaction. This provides a theory which is framed in cognition and human agency, and which is reactive to environmental, societal and cultural contexts. As such, it provides a new theoretical framework for future cognitive mapping research, raising new questions and providing testable hypotheses. In addition, the schema explicitly illustrates how geographical and psychological theory and practice can be combined to provide an integrative framework for cognitive mapping research.

Cognitive Processing, 2009

2013

The mental mapping method affords a lens into the way people produce and experience space, forms of spatial intelligence, and dynamics of human-environment relations. Mental mapping is the representation of an individual or group’s cognitive map, hand sketched and/or computer-assisted, in drafting and labeling a map or adding to and labeling an already existing map. Despite its long-term, rich, and multifaceted use across the social sciences, I found that the method’s development has been uneven and its analytics ad hoc and piecemeal. Drawing upon 32 mental sketch maps (MSM) and the interviews during which they were drafted, this paper provides an extensive review of the method, and details a total of 57 analytic components and techniques drawn from the literature and my own work in this study. I address these analytics from a critical geographic perspective in four categories to follow trends the data reveal. In my discussion I offer some future guidelines for research with MSM to continue to extend the method while growing from the body of knowledge already produced. This paper contributes a deeper understanding of how the mental maps can inform qualitative studies of people, place, and space across the social sciences.

In this third report, I focus on cognitive cartography in order to examine how the historical division between empiricist and critical approaches in cartography has shifted recently. I do so by building on Kitchin and Dodge's argument (2007) that parts of the apparent disjuncture within cartography might be resolved through a greater focus on emergent approaches to mapping as a process, which is the core idea of postrepresentational cartography. By looking at cognitive cartography from a post-representational perspective I emphasize two major trends. On the one hand, the processual positioning of post-representational cartography simply shifts the historical line of divide, since it inherently disqualifies any cognitive studies that artificially dissociate the map from its context of use and production. On the other hand, by enabling the combination of critical positioning with empiricist practices, post-representational cartography offers opportunities to revisit in practical terms the tensions between these two approaches. It provides an original framework to envision our mental, emotional and embodied relationships with maps and with places through maps, and has the potential to bring cartography into a new arena in which the empiricist/critical divide could be transcended.

The Professional Geographer, 1991

15 sance: Examining the causes and effects. Economic Development Commentary 12:13-17. Wekerle, G., and B. Rutherford. 1989. The nobility of capital and the immobility of female labor: R~~~~~~~~ to economic restructuring, In The Power ' f Geographyr ed' J' Wolch and M. Dear, 139-72. London: and Unwin. Wheeler, J. 1967. Occupational status and worktrips: A minimum distance approach. Social Forces 45:508-15. Geographic research has not focused on the information we encode into our memories about the characteristics of locations. The accuracy of information encoded in urban cognitive maps, how information varies among individuals, and the structure of the information were studied. Experimental results indicated subjects were more accurate and consistent for socio-economic than for life-cycle characteristics. Some characteristics of the population in a neighborhood, such as race and income, may be more visible and easier to encode through direct contact than other less visible characteristics such as age. A theoretical argument is made that characteristics not encoded for locations can possibly be computed through their covariation with known Characteristics. Key Words: cognitive maps, tacit knowledge, urban structure.

2005

2 -Les cartes cognitives en analyse spatiale : une approche multidisciplinaire Résumé Bien connues de l'analyste spatialiste, les cartes mentales restent un concept difficilement opérationnel. Le développement des sciences cognitives ouvre de nouvelles perspectives dont ce papier propose une piste. Grâce à une association entre économistes spatiaux, roboticiens et informaticiens dans le contexte d'une Action Concertée Incitative Société de l'Information "Géomatique, Espace, Territoires et Mobilités", nous montrons qu'il est possible de simuler des cartes cognitives d'agent en situation de rationalité limitée et située. Nous partons d'une hypothèse commune selon laquelle l'espace est au centre des stratégies individuelles. Nous soulignons l'idée selon laquelle la vision est centrale à l'apprentissage et à l'action spatiale située. Les cartes cognitives sont ainsi construites sur la base de préférences endogènes et permettent de dégager des résultats intéressants en matière de rationalité située. Par exemple, nous montrons que des agents cognitifs, c'est-à-dire dotés d'une carte cognitive, sont capables de résoudre des compromis spatiaux sans nécessairement optimiser un trajet à partir de ressources dont la localisation serait a priori connue. Mots clés : cartes cognitives, réseaux de neurones, apprentissage, multidisciplinarité

1991

The three papers contained in this report address different aspects of the problem of formalizing human communication about geographic space. Much of this thought grew out of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis's Research Initiative #2,"Languages of Spatial Relations". Each of these papers were presented at a NATO Advanced Study Institute on Cognitive and Linguistic Aspects of Geographic Space, held in Las Navas del Marques, Spain, during July 1990. The meeting was directed by Dav id Mark and coordinated by Andrew Frank. These papers will appear in a volume resulting from the meeting. They are being published as an NCGIA technical report to make them accessible before they are published and printed in that volume. The first paper, entitled "Deficiencies of SQL as a GIS Query Language", argues that SQL and various extended versions of it are not adequate geographic query languages. They lack the integration of graphical display in retrieval and presentation of query results and do not support the set operations necessary for spatial query. In the second paper, "A Formalization of Metaphors and Image-Schemas in User Interfaces", an algebraic approach to formalization of interface metaphors is presented as a step toward the design of metaphor-based interfaces. This approach to mapping source to target domains is demonstrated by analyzing the metaphorical and image-schematic bases the "zoom" function. The third paper, "Matching Representations of Geographic Locations", sets out fundamental differences in the representations of geographic space and spatial relations in minds, written location descriptions, and conventional cartographic data sets, and proposes a geographic data structure which might facilitate establishing correspondence between locations in each representation. Together, these papers range across theoretical and practical concerns in incorporating "spatial sense" in GIS.

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1987

Aggregate cognitive maps of urban areas differ from cartographic maps for reasons other than differences in the mobility and idiosyncratic experiences of individuals. Systematic distortions in aggregate urban cognitive maps may be caused by the cognitive processes used to code spatial information into memory or to retrieve it from memory and by the way these processes relate to a particular urban area. A purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which systematic distortions are present in aggregate urban cognitive maps and to investigate the causes of such distortions. Subjects from three neighborhoods were asked to provide estimates of distances and directions between 105 pairs of landmarks. We analyzed differences between these estimates and true distances and directions to determine if the patterns of distortions were significantly different among the three neighborhoods. Differences for the three samples appeared to be related to the scale and orientation of the aggregate cognitive maps. Regressions with aggregate data for the three neighborhoods using cognitive distance as the dependent variable and actual distance as the independent variable indicated a tendency to overestimate shorter distances more than longer distances. Using multidimensional scaling and Euclidean regression, we mapped subjects' cognitive locations for landmarks and the actual locations in the same space. The aggregate cognitive maps appeared to be rotated to align major transportation axes with canonical direction axes. We argue that systematic distortions are related to a rotation heuristic and to key reference points used by the subjects to code and access spatial information.