Cognitive Aspects: How People Perceive, Memorize, Think and Talk About Landmarks - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 43

Fig. 3.1 Folding this sheet of
paper along the dotted line ,
what will the result look like?

Refraining from siding with any particular factorization scheme, let us highlight
just a few spatial abilities which we will relate to later.

3.1.1.1 Visualizing Objects

People find it easy to visually imagine intimately familiar spaces, even without
visual stimulation. For example, people typically can answer a question such as
“Imagine entering your living room—now what's to your left?” They even can
manipulate these imaginations. Figure 3.1 shows a (picture of a) sheet of paper with
a dotted line printed in the center. A test for the ability of mentally manipulating this
object is: “Imagine folding it and viewing it from another angle. What will it look
like?”

3.1.1.2 Relating Objects

Another visual-spatial ability helps understanding the spatial relationships of objects
to each other [ 73 ] , including object recognition. It develops early in childhood and is
linked also to the emergence of stereo-(depth-)vision. People understand distances
between objects and proportions of objects, which are essential skills for tasks such
as packing a suitcase, constructing efficient mental models of objects from verbal or
pictorial descriptions (Fig. 3.2 ) , or interpreting a map.

3.1.1.3 Mental Rotation

People can form mental three-dimensional images of depicted objects, and rotate
these images mentally. In their famous experiment Shepard and Metzler asked
participants whether two figures are the depictions of the same object (Fig. 3.3 ) .
The time they take for deciding is proportional to the angular rotational difference,
which is evidence for an actual mental rotation [ 197 ] .BasedonShepardand
Metzler's stimuli, Vandenberg and Kuse developed later a pencil-and-paper test that
has become a widely accepted standard test for mental rotation [ 225 ] . A prominent
application of mental rotation is in map reading, where conventionally maps are
oriented north-up, independent from the current orientation of the map reader. Wall-
mounted maps are an obvious case for this argument since they need also to be
mentally rotated to the horizontal plane [ 150 ] . Mental rotation must also be at