Cognitive Aspects: How People Perceive, Memorize, Think and Talk About Landmarks - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 80

communication contexts, where an utterance (say, a street sign, or a mobile map)
will be read and interpreted in absence of the speaker, or where the speaker is
unrecognizable or irrelevant [ 235 ] . In addition, the communication skills of the
individual impact on the form and content of the message [ 226 ] .
While this intentio opere is identical for any reader, the intentio lectoris will be
individually different. The passer-by as a wayfinder seeks to match the meaning of
words with the environment found in order to progress towards the train station, and
as a researcher she seeks to isolate references to objects, and the spatial relationships
between the objects in order to reconstruct a mental spatial representation. It is there-
fore likely that the wayfinder and the researcher interpret this utterance differently.
For example, “turn left” will be interpreted by a wayfinder in situ, experiencing
a complex street intersection with a variety of affordances and opportunities to
move through, and the wayfinder will choose a way coming satisfactorily close to
the prototypical left-turn at the expected location. The researcher, in contrast, will
infer that the local knows a route involving two street segments and a particular
direction relationship. The wayfinder's interpretation reveals itself in action, while
the researcher's interpretation remains in the realm of language (probably a formal
language such as first order logic). Both readers will fill indeterminacies in the
instruction according to their reading context, applying the basic logic of cognitive
models [ 111 ] .
A further distinction regarding the cognitive economy in communication applies
to the way how a single landmark is referenced in an externalization. This
distinction is grounded in base level theory. Base level theory [ 180 ] postulates
that taxonomies of categorizations show categories of optimal abstraction at certain
levels. These base categories are those of maximal category resemblance (category
resemblance was introduced in Sect. 1.1.2 ) . Base categories are typically between
a superordinate level category that is more distinctive but also more abstract—
too abstract to show strong resemblance, and a subordinate level that is more
informative, but only slightly so and thus in many cases of unnecessary detail. For
example, furniture is an abstract category and difficult to visualize, while its instance
chair has strong resemblance linked to a visual prototype, while the subordinate
category stool is more specific, but so specific that in many cases the reference
“chair” is sufficient, and preferred.
Lloyd et al. [ 124 ] have shown that geographic categories are also organized
according to base level theory. Geographic base level categories (country, region,
state, city neighborhood) were associated with more common attributes than with
the superordinate and more abstract category of place (Sect. 1.2.1 ) , and that not
significantly more attributes were associated with the more informative categories
at subordinate level (such as home country, home state). Let us translate these
observations into the context of landmarks. With an abstract category landmark as
superordinate concept, the two messages “Turn left at the church” and “Turn left
at St. Francis” are pragmatically identical allowing a wayfinder to make the same
decision (assuming the next church is St. Francis). The prior is referring to a base
category with strong category resemblance linked to a visual prototype. The latter