Maps and Spaces

Two quite different concepts of space are important in geography and environmental psychology. One is the concept of macro-environment, of space as geographical scale. The other is the concept of form-at-a-timeless-instant: of naive geometry. Confusing these two concepts leads to serious errors. This paper examines some methodological and philosophical sources of this confusion, and points to a number of research problems in geography and psychology that can benefit from an untangling of the two concepts of space. One such problem is the need to understand the development of mapping abilities in very young children. Another is the larger question of building a body of theory to explain the development of macro-environmental cognition and behavior.     

Self-Organized Cognitive Maps

This paper argues cognitive mapping is a learning process that can be simulated by a self-organizing neural network. The learning of city locations was considered in two studies. One study focused on the learning of city locations on four continents. Results indicated the neural network aligned the cities producing systematic errors similar to those in human cognitive maps. A second study had a neural network learn a biased sample of city locations in the United States. Results indicated a non-linear relationship between cognitive and physical distances. Self-organized cognitive maps naturally produce this non-linear relationship when information from more than one scale is mapped into one space.