Cognitive Aspects: How People Perceive, Memorize, Think and Talk About Landmarks - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 56

Fig. 3.5 A corner store in
Guangzhou, China
(CC-BY-SA 3.0 by Whity )
Fig. 3.6 Tuchlauben 19,
Wien: a building from the
fourteenth century, but so are
the left and right neighbor.
Yet this one is special
Nevertheless it stands out in its immediate neighborhood by (commonly known)
visual characteristics (franchisees will ensure that stores are not too close to each
other, to avoid cannibalism), by its use, and by being located at a corner. Hence it
can serve as a reference point in mental spatial representations, and thus in route
descriptions: “At the corner store turn left”.
Despite the dominance of visual perception in human cognition, there are also
landmarks of weak or no visual distinction. In Fig. 3.6 , for example, it is hard to
isolate the building in the center from its neighbors visually. The buildings form
a visual unity. Even the buildings in the larger neighborhood are of similar age
and style. However, this building shelters in one floor the oldest secular frescoes in
Vienna. The rest of the building is still used as an ordinary apartment house, but the
frescoes make it distinct in the eyes of the citizens of Vienna and many visitors.
Other buildings—despite potential visual and semantic salience—stand out just
by their structural properties. For example, airports are typically known as nodes in