Abstract
Although cognitive map is a popular metaphor for people's mental representations of environments, as it is typically conceived, it is often too restrictive. Two other metaphors for mental representations are proposed and supported. Cognitive collages are consistent with research demonstrating systematic errors in memory and judgment of environmental knowledge. Yet, for some simple or well-known environments, people seem to have coherent representations of the coarse spatial relations among elements. These spatial mental models allow inference and perspectivetaking but may not allow accurate metric judgments.
Keywords
- Mental Representation
- Spatial Relation
- Spatial Cognition
- Environmental Knowledge
- Hierarchical Representation
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© 1993 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Tversky, B. (1993). Cognitive maps, cognitive collages, and spatial mental models. In: Frank, A.U., Campari, I. (eds) Spatial Information Theory A Theoretical Basis for GIS. COSIT 1993. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 716. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57207-4_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57207-4_2
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