Spatial Cognition, Cognitive Mapping, and Cognitive Maps

7.1 Background Cognitive mapping is defined as "a process composed of a series of psychological transformations by which an individual acquires, stores, recalls, and decodes information about the relative locations and attributes of the phenomena in his everyday spatial environment" (Downs & Stea, 1973: 7). Cognitive mapping is usually considered to be a subset of spatial cognition which can be defined as "the knowledge and internal or cognitive representation of the structure, entities and relations of space; in other words, the internalized reflection and reconstruction of space and thought" (Hart & Moore, 1973: 248). In turn, spatial cognition is sometimes seen as a subset of environmental cognition, which refers to "the awareness, impressions, information, images, and beliefs that people have about environments.. .. It implies not only that individuals and groups have information and images about the existence of these environments and of their constituent elements, but also that they have impressions about their character, function , dynamics, and structural interrelatedness, and that they imbue them with meanings, significance, and mythical-symbolic properties" (Moore & Golledge, 1976: xii). Thus, environmental cognition adds a set of affective components to the cognitive components emphasized in spatial cognition. These affective components include feeling, attitude, belief, value, and other emotional characteristics (Hart & Conn, 1991). Other definitions that include an emphasis on the term pEace instead of space are given in Kitchin (1994), but in this chapter we emphasize space, in all its multidimensionality, as the key concept. The end product of a cognitive mapping process is called a cognitive map. Usually accepted to be a device that helps to simplify and order the complexities of human-environment interactions (Walmsley, Saarinen, & MacCabe, 1990), the cog-nitive map is essentially our individual model of the world in which we live. The term cognitive map is now widely accepted in a number of disciplines. It had its origins in the work by Tolman (1948), who described why a rat running a maze in search for food might transgress the boundaries of the maze and go directly (as the crow flies) to the food source. This shortcutting procedure attributed to ~ 0 1-rat has become a standard indication that animals-and by analogy humans-can proceed directly from an origin to a destination without being forced to retrace a learned path. It was suggested later by Shemyakin (1962) that Tolman7s rat chose a solution to the food search problem that would …