Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
psychologists has focused on motivation (e.g. Guy and Curtis 1986 on the development
of perceptual maps).
Reviews of the social psychology of tourism indicate that there has been a paucity of
studies of tourist behaviour and adaptation to new environments they visit. This is
somewhat surprising since 'tourists are people who temporarily visit areas less familiar to
them than their home area' (Walmesley and Jenkins 1992:269). Therefore, one needs to
consider a number of fundamental questions related to:
• How will the tourists get to know the areas they visit?
• How do they find their way around unfamiliar environments?
• What features in the urban environment are used to structure their learning experience
in unfamiliar environments?
• What type of mental maps and images do they develop?
These issues are important in a tourism planning context since the facilities which tourists
use and the opportunities they seek will be conditioned by their environmental awareness.
This may also affect the commercial operation of attractions and facilities, since a lack of
awareness of the urban environment and the attractions within it may mean tourists fail to
visit them. Understanding how tourists interact with the environment to create an image
of the real world has been the focus of research into social psychology and behavioural
geography (see Walmesley and Lewis 1993:95-126). Geographers have developed a
growing interest in the geographic space perception of all types of individuals (Downs
1970), without explicitly considering tourists in most instances. Behavioural geographers
emphasise the need to examine how people store spatial information and 'their choice of
different activities and locations within the environment' (Walmesley and Lewis
1993:95). The process through which individuals perceive the urban environment is
shown in Figure 5.9. While this is a simplification, Haynes (1980) notes that no two
individuals will have an identical image of the urban environment because the
information they receive is subject to mental processing. This is conditioned by the
information signals they receive through their senses (e.g. sight, hearing, smell, taste and
touch) and this part of the process is known as
perception
. As our senses may
comprehend only a small proportion of the total information received, the human brain
sorts the information and relates it to the knowledge, values and attitudes of the
individual through the process of
cognition
(Page 1995a: 222). The final outcome of the
perception and cognition process is the formation of a mental image of a place. These
images are an individual's own view of reality, but they are important to the individual
and group when making decisions about their experience of a destination, whether to visit
again, and their feelings in relation to the tourist experience of place. As Downs and Stea
(1977:2) observed, 'a cognitive map is a cross section representing the world at one
instant in time', a feature explored by Crang and Travelou (2001) in relation to the
historic sites of Athens. In the psychology literature, Curiel and Radvansky (2002) note
that one way to examine this issue is to understand how people memorise a map to
recognise how their resulting mental representation of that map influences their use of
that map.
As Walmesley and Lewis (1993) suggested,
