Cognitive Aspects: How People Perceive, Memorize, Think and Talk About Landmarks - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 66

the ability to extract relevant or appropriate information and to mentally rotate a
map to establish correspondences. Furthermore, beyond vista space children must
establish correspondences with their memories, or their knowledge of environmental
or geographic space.
Blades [ 11 ] focuses on children's strategies to extract appropriate information
from maps, and to locate themselves on the map. He finds that children from the
age of 3 years have some appreciation of correspondences, and from 4 years of age
they start using a map and can locate themselves—which is a qualitative or at most
comparative procedure after establishing the correspondences, and does not require
metric notions. But only older children can use maps for more elaborate strategies
such as finding places or following routes because these tasks go beyond vista space
and require logical and abstract thinking.
One particular challenge of establishing these correspondences raises from
the perspective taking 3 of the map. The map is built for a purpose, with other
words it is a focused and selective representation. The purpose dictates scale,
selection of map objects (classes and individuals), and cartographic representation
including symbology and coloring. The same environment can be represented by
entirely different maps. Especially landmarks, the anchor points for spanning a
frame of reference in the map reading process, can appear in a large variety of
representations. The point-like landmark—the landmark in Lynch's sense—may
be represented by a symbol, by a simplified, potentially perspective view, by an
extended region, or by text. Since other elements can have landmarkness as well,
such as rivers, streets and intersections, the process of establishing a frame of
reference amounts to a complex procedure already in the mind of a child.

3.3.2.2 Frames of Reference

Mental spatial representations, just as external ones, are based on spatial frames
of reference. The role of a frame of reference is facilitating an unambiguous way
to locate things in a space. A frame of reference is established by its datum.
Mathematically the datum comprises an origin location and direction (short: origin )
from which distance and direction measurements are made.
For a cognizing individual the datum can be an oriented object in the real
world, defining location and direction. Two kinds of objects come to mind: The
own body (an egocentric perspective ), or another oriented object (an allocentric
perspective )[ 17 , 99 , 106 ] . Taking my body as origin I can visualize that “the
library is right of me, not far”, which relates the library to my body, or describes
its location with respect to my body's location and heading. Using an egocentric
frame of reference has some challenges, despite being the frame of reference babies

3 The term perspective taking is used here deliberately in the most general sense of focusing on a
situation, selecting relevant objects and relations, and then choosing a geometric perspective. In
contrast, linguistics understands only the latter as perspective taking [ 118 ] .