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Quotes about cognitive geography

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1970s
  • Cognitive mapping is a very effective and flexible ability, which employs a range of signatures to cope with spatial information. In the next part of this chapter we will show how the mapping process and these signatures are handled cognitively. However, it is always difficult to pin down and dissect a process. Our language is more capable of expressing static things than discussing elusive change. This difficulty is compounded when the process, cognitive mapping, is an internal, mental activity that cannot be observed directly. We are forced to draw inferences from and to speculate about the outcome of the process. We can get fleeting but imperfect glimpses at the ongoing operation of the process by watching somebody draw a sketch map...
    • Downs, Roger M., and David Stea. Maps in minds: Reflections on cognitive mapping. HarperCollins Publishers, 1977.
1980s
  • As concepts and terminology from various branches of psychology have been assimilated by behavioral geographers, the paradigm of cognitive psychology has proved particularly attractive.. The following concerns are characteristic of this approach:
i. An emphasis on the acquisition, processing, and storage of information, and its growth by learning.
ii. A concern with mental content: schemata, images, knowledge, concepts, habits, motives, and drives.
iii. A teleological account of action in terms of motivated intents and purposes.
iv. A structural decomposition of the continuum of behavior into actions defined by inferred purpose and not by publicly-observable topography.
v. An account of ongoing behavior with reference to short- and long-term integrations of internal schemata and external stimuli under the central control of attention.
vi. A hierarchic structure of long- and short-term goals in which individual acts may serve multiple purposes, governed by a system of interrupts which define priorities..
Several programmatic statements by behavioral geographers adopt a cognitive paradigm explicitly...
  • Pipkin, J. S. "The concept of choice and cognitive explanations of spatial behavior." Economic Geography (1981): 315-331.
1990s
  • The main force which led to the decline of cognitive geography was structuralist-Marxist-humanist geography which in the early 1970s started to challenge the then dominant positivist quantitative geography. ... Their complaint against cognitive geography
    • Portugali, Juval. "Geography, environment and cognition: an introduction." Geoforum 23.2 (1992): 107-109.
  • The aim of this book is to shed light on processes associated with the construction of cognitive maps, that is to say, with the construction of internal representations of very large spatial entities such as towns, cities, neighborhoods, landscapes, metropolitan areas, environments and the like. Because of their size, such entities can never be seen in their entirety, and consequently one constructs their internal representation by means of visual, as well as non-visual, modes of sensation and information: text; auditory, haptic and olfactory means for example, or by inference. Intersensory coordination and information-transfer thus play a crucial role in the construction of cognitive maps.
    • Portugali, Juval, ed. The construction of cognitive maps. Vol. 32. Springer Science & Business Media, 1996.
  • This paper reviews research in geographical cognition that provides part of the theoretical foundation of geographical information science. Freestanding research streams in cognitive science, behavioural geography, and cartography converged in the last decade or so with work on theoretical foundations for geographical information systems to produce a coherent research community that advances geographical information science, geographical information systems, and the contributing fields and disciplines.
  • The idea that a science of geographical information should have a cognitive foundation emerged with the development of GIScience itself in the late 1980s, when it was included in the successful proposal for the National Center for Geographical Information and Analysis (NCGIA 1989).
2000s
  • At a theoretical level, cognitive mapping research seeks to explain fundamental questions concerning spatial knowledge acquisition, spatial processing, and how spatial understanding is realized, and spatial choices and decisions are made. At a basic level, it is commonly understood that spatial behaviour - daily navigation, such as routes chosen (wayfinding), and also decisions concerning everyday activities such as where to shop (see Chapter 4) - is predicated upon levels and use of spatial knowledge. Therefore an understanding of spatial knowledge necessarily leads to an understanding of people's spatial behaviour.
    • Kitchin, Rob, and Scott Freundschuh, eds. Cognitive mapping: Past, present, and future. Vol. 4. Psychology Press, 2000.
  • Cognitive mapping is “the process whereby the subject comes to an impressionistic sense of her/his location in relation to a range of unevenly empowered environments."
    • Gerry Smyth (2001) Space and the Irish cultural imagination, as quoted in Leigh Wood (2008), Putting a Shape on what was There: Cognitive Mapping and Finding Escape in the Poetry of Ciaran Carson. p. 34
  • Spatializations are computer visualizations in which nonspatial information is depicted spatially. Spatializations of large databases commonly use distance as a metaphor to depict semantic (nonspatial) similarities among data items. By analogy to the “first law of geography”, which states that closer things tend to be more similar, we propose a “first law of cognitive geography,” which states that people believe closer things are more similar. In this paper, we present two experiments that investigate the validity of the first law of cognitive geography as applied to the interpretation of “point-display spatializations.” Point displays depict documents (or other information-bearing entities) as 2- or 3-dimensional collections of points. Our results largely support the first law of cognitive geography and enrich it by identifying different types of distance that may be metaphorically related to similarity. We also identify characteristics of point displays other than distance relationships that influence similarity judgments.
  • Cognitive geography has interested many researchers from various fields, including civil engineering, geography, cognitive science, sociology, and marketing... Researchers are interested in this subject because human spatial behavior is often based on a cognitive image of space, rather than on the actual physical structure. People act according to how they understand their environment. A pioneering work in this field is that of Lynch, a civil engineer, who uncovered basic elements of a city image from questionnaires collected from local residents.
  • Cognitive geography is increasingly important in the new applications of geographic information systems (GIS). Until recently, GIS has been a specialized tool for trained users such as scientists and city planners. Now more and more people use GIS for daily activities, including car navigation, pedestrian navigation, and a map service over the Internet. For these new applications, cognitive information plays an important role in making the map easier to understand for untrained users.
    Conventional work on uncovering of cognitive geography, however, was mainly based on questionnaires. Such an approach is not directly applicable for practical purposes in landmark extraction, because collection and analysis of questionnaires are often cumbersome, labor-intensive tasks...
  • Cognitive geography is the study of cognition, primarily human cognition, about space, place, and environment. Cognition is knowledge and knowing by sentient entities, including humans, nonhuman animals, and artificially intelligent machines. Cognitive structures and processes include those of sensation, perception, thinking, learning, memory, attention, imagination, conceptualization, language, and reasoning and problem solving. Some of these structures and processes are consciously accessible, potentially available to awareness; others are nonconscious, outside of awareness. Cognition is functionally and experientially intertwined with affect, motivation, and behavior. Our beliefs and knowledge influence, and are influenced by, what we feel and what we do.
    • Montello, Daniel R. "Cognitive geography." International encyclopedia of human geography 2 (2009): 160
  • Cognitive geography emerged as an approach within human geography and as an interdisciplinary link with psychology and other fields during the 1960s but reflected strands of inquiry from at least as early as the beginning of the twentieth century.
    • Montello, Daniel R. "Cognitive geography." International encyclopedia of human geography 2 (2009): 160-166.
  • Cognitive geography originated as a component of the behavioral approach in human geography; it thus shares much of the philosophical character of behavioral geography.
    • Montello, Daniel R. "Cognitive geography." International encyclopedia of human geography 2 (2009): 160-166.

Montello (2009) introduced the principles of cognitive geography as follows:

2010s
  • Cognitive geography is a direction of geography, studying spatial presentations, mechanisms of their forming and the use in different aspects of human activity. Spatial ideas about territory for different social, national and economic groups play an important role at investment politics. The task of administrative organs is the creation of positive character of their territory – a country, an area, a district. The territorial informational systems allow to collect, process, analyze and present the spatial information, forming the character of the territory while using the text, tabular and cartographic methods for presenting the data.
    • Plotnytskyy S.V. "Cognitive geography and territorial informational systems" in: S.V. Plotnytskyy Scientific Notes of Taurida V. I. Vernadsky National University. – Series: Philology. Social communications. – 2012. – Vol. 25 (64), No 2, part 2. – P. 91–96.
  • Waldo Tobler’s First Law of Cognitive Geography is a useful place to begin understanding what makes local news so appealing. The law states that everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things (Hecht & Moxley, 2009).
Comments

Quotes collected by -- Mdd (talk) 09:56, 8 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Resources

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Hello, Editors interested in further developing this article may find useful background resources at this webpage. Thanks, DA Sonnenfeld (talk) 13:36, 24 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]