Cognitive Aspects: How People Perceive, Memorize, Think and Talk About Landmarks - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 49

Siegel and White have looked at the development of a mental spatial representa-
tion of an environmental space by somebody unfamiliar to this environment [ 198 ] .
Siegel and White studied the first-hand experience of the environment by loco-
motion. However, environments can also be learned from secondary sources such
as maps, sketches, verbal route descriptions or tourist guides. Thus, the following
sequence of learning, described by Siegel and White, is not a step-by-step process
but rather a complex continuous process [ 147 ] .
During locomotion, any outstanding experience along the route will trigger a
memory, located in space roughly by path integration. Siegel and White call this type
of knowledge in the emerging mental spatial representation landmark knowledge .
Landmark knowledge can also be mediated. The armchair traveller to Paris, reading
about the highlights of Paris in a tourist guide and locating them on a map, will have
a similar experience.
The path integration between landmark experiences provides connections called
by Siegel and White route knowledge and elsewhere also procedural knowledge .
The mode of locomotion, effort, and intensity of experience all impact on the
experience of distance. Contributing to the sense of distance are motor sense, visual
and auditory sense, but also the memory loading along the route, that means the
number of objects or events experienced along the route, the degree of unfamiliarity
with an environment, the mental preoccupation, and many more factors. Those who
learn from secondary sources infer route knowledge from reading a tour description
or reading a map [ 69 ] .
A third tier of knowledge, called survey knowledge by Siegel and White, and
also called configurational knowledge , emerges from integrating routes over time
into a network-like representation that can be analyzed for directions and distances.
Route segments can be freely recombined for wayfinding and orientation. However,
people seem to have different cognitive preferences for representing an environment,
or short, cognitive styles [ 163 ] . They are more landmark-focused, route-focused,
or survey-focused. Their cognitive styles are correlated with spatial abilities [ 164 ] .
According to Ishikawa and Montello some people even do not develop a survey
representation, irrespective of the frequency of exposure to an environment or the
activity in the environment [ 87 ] .
Differing classifications were used as well. Piaget and Inhelder argued for a
figurative knowledge —visual imagery of objects and configuration of objects—
and operative knowledge —the ability to manipulate the visual imagery [ 166 ] .
More recently, Gardner has suggested to make a distinction between relatively static
and relatively active forms of spatial knowledge [ 60 ] . Declarative knowledge has
been contrasted with procedural knowledge by Mandler [ 131 ] . Since declarative
spatial knowledge lends itself to visual imagination it is similar to figurative or
configurational knowledge.
Whichever classification is used, landmarks form the glue. Equipped with a
representation of such knowledge orientation and wayfinding become possible. For
example, Allen [ 3 ] has proposed a framework for examining the cognitive abilities
involved in wayfinding. The framework consists of wayfinding tasks on one hand
and means to accomplish these tasks on the other hand. In all of his identified tasks