Cognitive Maps and Spatial Behaviour: Process and Products

Abstract

At the start of the 1970s, it was intellectually fashionable amongst behavioural geographers to investigate the significance of cognitive maps, and their impacts on people's spatial behaviour. Downs and Stea's book was probably the most influential overview of the field and brought together papers from almost all of the leading exponents of this kind of research. We have excerpted Chapter 1, which explores the dimensions of cognitive mapping, distinguishing between cartographic images and the cognitive constructs that are the focus of their attention. This conceptual piece is informed by a communications model of information transmission and explores processes and defines concepts underpinning research. The authors define the concepts of perception, cognition, attitude and preference, before explaining the differences between what people need to know and what they actually know. Amongst other concepts they focus on differences between locational and attribute information, the role of incomplete, distorted, schematised, and augmented cognitive maps, and some of the behavioural reasons for the mismatch between theory and practice. They conclude by urging further experimental investigation of behavioural evidence of cognitive mapping. Originally published in 1973: Chapter 1 in Roger M. Downs and David Stea (eds) Image and Environment: Cognitive Mapping and Spatial Behavior,

Measuring Citizens’ Fear of Crime Using a Web Application: A Case Study

“…Mental mapping is a research method on how we see and perceive a space in our mind (Downs & Stea, 1973). Individual perception of an area may depend on a large number of factors, such as mode of transport, age, education, etc.…”

A Reading Attempt of the Urban Memory of Eskisehir Osmangazi University Meselik Campus via Cognitive Mapping

“…A cognitive map that was firstly introduced by Edward Tolman in 1948, is a type of mental representation which serves an individual to acquire, code, store, recall, and decode information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in their everyday or metaphorical spatial environment [4]. In other words, cognitive mapping is formally defined by Downs and Stea [5] as "a process composed of a series of psychological transformations by which an individual acquires, codes, stores, recalls, and decodes information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in their everyday spatial environment". In more general terms, a cognitive map may be defined as "an overall mental image or representation of the space and layout of a setting", which means that the act of cognitive mapping is "the mental structuring process leading to the creation of a cognitive map" [6].…”

“…These are 'through an individual's sensory modalities, from symbolic representations such as maps, from ideas about the environment which are inferred from experiences in other similar spatial locations'. Of these, an individual's sensory modalities provide direct sources of information and are more effective in cognitive map formation than indirect sources [5]. In another study, Kuipers [10] suggests that a cognitive map consists of five different types of information, Appleyard [11] and Moore [12] gave route descriptions to adults and requested them to draw sketch maps of their cities.…”

Representing Human Spatial Behavior by Self-Organizing Networks

“…Our internal knowledge representations about familiar environments (Downs and Stea, 1973;Kuipers, 1982) are called "Cognitive Maps". Alternative knowledge representations for mobile applications to recognize our familiar paths are created in this paper.…”

“…For each input node, every output node calculates the distance to that input node as, DIST(I,0) = Ja j(x,,, -x,,)^ +(;;",, ^yj^ßl^t^^^^ _,J^ where a and ß is the weight to define the relation between space and time (both a and ß values are 1 in the experiment). The output node with the minimum DIST value, which is called "winner node", and its neighborhood output nodes update their vectors as, (3) where j is the id of the winner node, and 0. (0 is the vector of the output node / at iteration t .…”