Cognitive Maps of Appalachia

Abstract

OGNITIVE maps influence the geographical relationships between persons and places. Individuals constantly interact with an environment that is too complex to comprehend or understand fully. Cultural values, needs, and experiences provide a context in which persons observe their environment and order or eliminate the information that they may garner from it. The sorted cognitive information is functional because it becomes the basis for certain types of geographical behavior in relation to the environment. Roger M. Downs and David Stea suggested that individuals use three methods to order their geographical experiences.l By concentrating on the similarities among places or objects in the environment, individuals classify their environment in sets of characteristics that describe different parts of it. Simplified information from the environment is classified according to geographical relationships in order to produce cognitive images of places. Individuals may categorize information regionally. This process involves simplification of information to stereotypes of people and landscapes that may or may not be accurate. But individuals behave as if the images were correct, and consequently geographical behavior is molded or modified by these images.2 Another issue is how groups of individuals process environmental information. Members of a group share knowledge, experiences, and beliefs about places, including stereotypes that range from reality through myth to valuebased emotional distortions.3 When members of a particular group are asked to portray their cognitive images in the form of a graphic map, the results tend to exhibit a consistent set of characteristics. The principle of proximity influences the number of characteristics that are recognized and the range of the geographical content in which the characteristics are placed.4 In a graphic portrayal of cognitive images, the places that are closest to the observer are usually the best known and the easiest to recall in detail. Graphic representations of nearby environments are generally abundant in details in comparison with maps of distant environments or places that were not observed or experienced firsthand. A qualification of this generalization is that highly publicized events in some distant area might provide information about the place that would