Cognitive Aspects: How People Perceive, Memorize, Think and Talk About Landmarks - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 63

the edge while the latter were more common after contractions and for locations nearer
to the center. The spatial distributions of responses predicted by various simple geometric
models were compared to the data. The best fitting model was one derived from the response
properties of place cells in the rat hippocampus, which matches the proximities 1=.d Cc/
of the cue to the four walls of the arena, where d is the distance to a wall and c is a global
constant.

Also, the geometry of the arena seemed to have served as a weak cue for orientation.
Overall people seemed to combine two strategies: matching the distant visual cue
for orientation, and representing proximity to the walls of the arena consistent with
path integration.
Knauff added to this discussion [ 104 ] by arguing for a stronger separation of
mental visual imagery and spatial reasoning. He refers to the long tradition in
cognitive science of thinking of a pathway for visual object identification—the
processing of visual properties such as shape, texture and color—and a pathway for
recognizing where objects are in space. He also cites Landau and Jackendoff [ 114 ] ,
who observed evidence in language encoding for a non-linguistic, cognitive dispar-
ity in the representation of what and where . Similarly, one could cite the visual sense
with its separate predispositions for the detection of location and the recognition of
objects [ 13 , 138 , 191 ] . Here Knauff suggests that “human reasoning is based on
spatial representations that are more abstract than visual images and more concrete
than propositional representations” (p. 16), claiming that spatial representations
are not restricted to a certain format, and integrate different types of information
while avoiding excessive visual detail.
Now, taking Knauff's suggestion seriously, a particular role for landmarks opens
up. Since landmarks have both properties, the visual imagery of object identity and
the anchoring to location, landmarks do form the bridge between mental visual
imagery and mental spatial representations. This location-object binding will be
useful in both, the subconscious, automatic cognitive processes (System 1), such as
self-localization, and conscious cognitive processes (System 2), such as searching
for a landmark provided in a verbal route description.

3.3.2 The Mind

Now let us focus on the cognitive capacity to form and maintain representations of
the spatial environment, and to recall from these representations for reasoning or
sharing knowledge with others. We will see that landmarks play a central role in all
these processes. We will concentrate on cognitive studies; Sect. 3.4 will be dedicated
to sharing knowledge with others.