Cognitive Aspects: How People Perceive, Memorize, Think and Talk About Landmarks - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 84

a specific mobility characteristic. Different perspectives can produce different
uses of these elements. With other words, as externalizations of mental spatial
representation these sketches are producing only views.
Lynch's landmark is of course substantially different from our own notion as
laid out in Sect. 1.1.3 . Nowadays it is generally acknowledged that all of Lynch's
elements can have some landmarkness in terms of cognitive salience. Milgram,
supported by Jodelet, collected a similar dataset to Lynch's, for the city of Paris. His
psychological maps of Paris [ 143 ] reveal not only the imperfect mapping between
reality (the city in stone) and people's mental spatial representations, as we would
now expect after the discussion above. They also reveal the individual reference
points people have used in their sketches. Milgram is aware of this additional
outcome: He lists the “50 most frequently cited elements”, a list of landmarks
that—not surprisingly for those who have ever visited Paris—starts with Seine,
l'Étoile, Tour Eiffel, Notre Dame, and Champs-Élysées. Already these few top
elements from the list are supporting the argument that all of Lynch's elements can
have some landmarkness. The Seine would be a barrier (for pedestrians and cars)
according to Lynch, l'Étoile a node, and Champs-Élysées a path.

3.4.3 Verbal Descriptions

People also externalize their mental spatial representations when they give verbal,
i.e., spoken or written descriptions about locations, configurations, or directions to
a recipient. Similar to sketches, landmarks are reference points for anchoring verbal
descriptions in location.
A fundamental observation about landmarks in verbal descriptions has been
made by Landau and Jackendoff [ 114 ] . They observed that the located objects
(locatum) appear to be encoded in language with more detailed geometric prop-
erties such as their axis, their volume, surfaces and parts. In contrast, reference
objects (relata) are encoded only with coarse geometric properties, primarily the
main axes. Their observation is consistent with our expectation that the relata
are shared knowledge. They do not require description except what is needed
to establish the frame of reference for the locatum, i.e., information about their
orientation. In addition, they found the preference for prepositions of qualitative
spatial relationships, especially topology, distance and direction. They conclude:
“The striking differences in the way language encodes objects [locata] versus places
[relata] lead us to [postulate] a non-linguistic disparity between the representations
of what and where ”, a disparity that already had been discussed above to be detected
in the visual apparatus [ 13 , 191 ] , as well as in the neuronal basis of the mental spatial
representation [ 104 ] . In a cross-linguistic comparison between English, Japanese
and Korean, Munnich et al. added that spatial properties show sufficient similarity
between languages to assume a common cognitive basis [ 153 ] .
These verbal descriptions cover the same communication purposes as the
sketches discussed above, but use a different language, namely a non-visual and
linear language. Verbal descriptions are sequential in utterance and understanding.