Cognitive Aspects: How People Perceive, Memorize, Think and Talk About Landmarks - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 52

the human ability to reason above his doubts about frequently deceptive perceptual
sensations. The perceptions' deceptiveness still concerns research. Optical illusions
demonstrate that our visual system already interprets retinal images before the con-
scious mind gets access. Purves and Lotto suggest that the visual system interprets
stimuli based on experience, or on what has been learned to hypothesize as it had
been true in many cases before [ 171 ] . Such a pre-processing is a prime example
for System 1 thinking. One hypothesis applied by the visual system is the grey
world assumption , the assumption that the average reflectance of an environment
is grey. While this assumption in many cases provides useful interpretations, it can
be misled by influences of illumination and reflection. Thus, Descartes' scepticism
is appropriate, and O'Regan's quest is not trivial.
O'Regan claims that “an organism consciously feels something when it has at
least a rudimentary self which has access consciousness to the fact that it is engaged
in a particular type of sensorimotor interaction with the world, namely one that
possesses richness, bodiliness, insubordinateness, and grabbiness” (p. 120). These
four principles are:
Richness The reality is richer than memories and imaginings.
Bodiliness Vision and other senses have bodiliness, as any movement of the body
produces an immediate change in the visual (or other sensory) input.
Insubordinateness The sensory input is not totally controlled, or can change even
if the body does not move because the external reality changes.
Grabbiness Senses like the human visual system are alert to any changes in the
sensory input.
The experience of landmarks is an involuntary act, one that does not involve
conscious decision or choice. In this sense, landmarks must have properties that
correspond to the grabbiness of human senses. They can have other, less grabbing
attention properties as well, because of the richness of reality. In addition, a human
will experience that this particular sensory input is related to a particular location in
the environment instead of a particular body movement. It can only be repeated by
reaching the same location. This aspect relates to O'Regan's insubordinateness.
Accordingly, in Kahneman's categories, learning an environment by landmarks
involves System 1. The mind develops a representation of the environment that
is independent from intellectual rigour or effort, and merely based on embodied
experience (and thus, of course, depending on attention). The mental representation,
however, is accessible to both, System 1 and System 2. People find their way in a
known environment and orient themselves in the environment without an explicit
involvement of System 2. During wayfinding, the interplay between expected
sensory input from certain locations and actual sensory input confirming these
expectations provides a feeling of being oriented. System 2, however, can access
the mental spatial representation to explain, for example, the current orientation with
respect to a few learned landmarks. Similarly, although the route of daily commute
is travelled without conscious thinking, it takes System 2 to explain this route to
another person.