Cognitive Aspects: How People Perceive, Memorize, Think and Talk About Landmarks - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 40

The first sign, a potential isolation by brain damage, assumes that particular areas
in the brain are responsible for particular tasks (or abilities). While these associ-
ations are generally observable for some spatial tasks—see for example [ 181 ] —
looking closer into spatial abilities this argument might be difficult to prove.
Many spatial abilities combine activities in different brain regions, not to mention
the plasticity of the brain. One reason may be that spatial skills are themselves
quite diverse, and hence not necessarily located in a single brain region. Take
for example the range between visual-spatial abilities (e.g., object recognition),
spatial memory abilities (e.g., object localization), or the cognitive elements of
sensorimotor abilities (e.g., self-localization). In their own way, however, each of
these abilities is interacting with landmarks.
Despite the breadth of spatial abilities, applying these criteria and further
evidence, Gardner [ 60 ] identified a small set of 'intelligences', and among these a
spatial intelligence . In some sense spatial abilities are fulfilling the other two signs.
They are problem-solving skills, for example, recognizing or imagining an object
from an unfamiliar angle, coordinating body movement or solving more complex
tasks like wayfinding. Spatial abilities support everyday activities, such as finding
home again, but also professional skills such as playing the piano (sensorimotor),
imagining a DNA sequence (visual-spatial), or navigating an airplane (a combina-
tion). Some people feel good at spatial intelligence, and others will have difficulties
with, for example, reading a map, or explaining a route. Central to Gardner's
argument is that these abilities cannot be fully replaced (or explained) by other
capacities, for example verbal or logical-mathematical intelligence. Others have
even pointed out that spatial abilities help reasoning in non-spatial domains [ 154 ] .
Nevertheless, spatial intelligence remains built on a variety of abilities. These
spatial abilities can even be differently pronounced in individuals. For example,
some may be acute in visual perception, but bad in self-localization. The individual
performance in these skills can be tested, and these tests are quite popular.
In this topic we do not use the term spatial intelligence , but its more established
synonym spatial cognition . However, while the composite of spatial abilities
define spatial cognition, confusingly the scientific study of these abilities is also
called spatial cognition. The Handbook of Spatial Cognition , for example, states:
“Spatial cognition is a branch of cognitive science” [ 231 ] . In effect it should
be called spatial cognitive science. Anyway, relating back to the superordinate
category, cognitive science , may not immediately help clarifying when eminent
researchers say:
Cognitive science is not yet established as a mature science [...] it is really more of
a loose affiliation of disciplines than a discipline of its own. Interestingly, an important
pole is occupied by Artificial Intelligence [...] other affiliated disciplines are generally
taken to consist of linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, sometimes anthropology, and the
philosophy of mind ( [ 227 ] , p. 4).
Accordingly, spatial cognitive science has many flavors or shades. It “seeks to
understand how humans and other animals perceive, interpret, mentally represent
and interact with the spatial characteristics of their environment” [ 231 ] . “The study