Structures Of Mental Spaces

Abstract

Human activity takes place in space. To act effectively, people need mental representations of space. People’s mental representations of space differ from space as conceived of by physicists, geometers, and cartographers. Mental representations of space are constructions based on elements, the things in space, and the spatial relations among them relative to a reference frame. People act in different spaces depending on the task at hand. The spaces considered here are the space of the body, the space around the body, the space of navigation, and the space of graphics. Different elements and spatial relations are central for functioning in the different spaces, yielding different mental representations.