Landmarks: A Thought Experiment - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 37

The fact that our environment resembled an urban environment does not matter.
The same insights about landmarks could have been made in a process introducing
landmarks in a landscape. Spatial cognition certainly developed in natural environ-
ments, but its mechanisms apply equally in human-made environments.
Landmarks' primary role appears to be structuring a mental representation of
an environment by forming anchors for relational links. Verbalized, these anchors
and their links appear to convert into relational descriptions. Evidence for this
assumption will be presented in the next chapter. Without landmarks both tasks,
forming a mental representation of an environment and, correspondingly, being able
to communicate about locations in the environment, appear to be significantly more
complex, relying on locomotion and path integration only.
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