Cognitive Aspects: How People Perceive, Memorize, Think and Talk About Landmarks - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 71

abstracted form of an object as a purely spatial reference, and more detail of a visual
image. For reasons of cognitive efficiency the mind may only recall what is just
needed. For example, wayfinding according to a plan “at the corner store turn left”
requires first to find a store, which can be based on a fast low-detail schema, and
only when a store has been identified in the environment a detailed visual image
from memory is required for object disambiguation.
Hierarchies by Salience
We encountered already global landmarks and local landmarks, landmarks that stand
out in a larger environment—such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris—and landmarks
that stand out only locally—such as a corner store along a street, or ATMs in the
entrance area of a mall. The coarse classification hints to asymmetric relationships.
For example, “the ATM at Eiffel Tower” may be accepted, but “Eiffel Tower at the
ATM” is not. One is more salient than the other, even dominant.
Thus, configurations of landmarks (a 'layer' in a salience hierarchy) comprises
similar objects, but similarity is based here on salience, not size or level of detail.
Selection and weighting, we have argued above, are linked to the embodied or
mediated experience of the environment. We mentioned already the following
factors contributing to salience: The figure-ground contrast, the relevance of the
location, and the frequency of encounter or prominence. The more salient landmarks
are the more easily recalled objects of an environment [ 8 ] . If some objects are
more easily recalled into working memory they must also be earlier available for
processing. Besides of priming the mental spatial representation, they also serve as
available reference locations for other objects nearby (“at the Eiffel Tower”).
The first evidence for such reference points in mental spatial representations was
provided by Sadalla et al. [ 184 ] . They asked participants for distance judgements
between pairs of reference- and non-reference points. In their words:
Since a reference point is regarded as a place that defines the position of other adjacent
places, it follows that other places should more easily be seen in spatial relation to a
reference point than vice versa [...]: Adjacent places should be judged closer to reference
points than are reference points to adjacent places (p. 517).
One of their tests, for example, demonstrated different judgements for questions
like “Is the newsagent's close to the hospital?” and “Is the hospital close to the
newsagent's?”, with the hospital assumed to be a reference object. Also, distance
judgements to reference points are made faster than to non-reference points, and
direction judgements to other reference points are made faster when at a reference
point. Adding to these observations, Allen [ 2 ] found that distance estimates across
object clusters around reference points were judged to be consistently longer than
distances of the same length within such clusters.
Couclelis et al. [ 31 ] concentrate then on the link of objects with their reference
object, i.e., the link of a location characterized by a landmark and its reference
region .Theycallitthe tectonic plate hypothesis. According to the tectonic plate