Spatial Cognition as Events

Abstract

This chapter deals with the question of how adults process information about large-scale physical features and their spatial relations during navigation between places. The presentation is based on the presumption that single acts of cognition are comparatively unimportant in real-life travel. Accordingly, sequential relations between acts are emphasized, which is the reason for the term event in the title. In general, ways of seeing how spatial cognition is organized in time and space should further the search for connections between the fields of spatial cognition, environmental assessment and action. However, the latter prospect is beyond the scope of this chapter. The aim—to make explicit the sequence aspect of cognitive acts in several problem areas of spatial cognition—is pursued in a spirit of inductive analysis in that a number of act sequences are discussed as examples of important spatial cognition events. The approach is first described in broad outline. Processing of large-scale spatial information may entail different theoretical perspectives on levels of mental functioning. Basic mechanisms and operations that underlie the occurrence of cognitive acts represent one level, being the main focus of contemporary theory construction and model building. Further, cognitive acts are reflected in conscious activity and self-consciousness, which represent a second level. Finally, a third level emerges to the extent that cognitive acts are reliably ordered continuously in time and space. Common categories of acts in large-scale spatial cognition are perceptual identification, encoding, recognition, and recall of environmental information, judgments of topological, projective, and metric spatial relations, spatial inference, visual-spatial imagery, and spatial choice. Detailed processing underlying these cognitive acts is progressively unraveled by means of refined task paradigms, deductive reasoning, mathematics, and procedures for controlling subjects’ behavioral and mental activities. This kind of knowledge is sparse in the field of large-scale spatial cognition (Pick, 1985). Independent variables in experiments have been related as often to issues of development, the structure of location information in cognitive maps, methodology, or application as to the nature of processing per se (cf. Evans, 1980). In the long run, theory about underlying processing is indispensible for any of these concerns, including the event approach to be presented here.