Cognitive geography

Cognitive geography is an interdisciplinary study of cognitive science as well as geography. It aims to understand how humans impression space, place, in addition to environment. It involves the formalization of factors that influence our spatial knowledge to score a more effective representation of space. These improving models guide in a species of issues, for example, the developing maps thatbetter, providing navigation instructions that are easier to follow, utilizing space more practically, accounting for a cultural differences on spatial thinking for more powerful cross-cultural information exchange, as well as an overall increased apprehension of our environment.

Notable researchers in this branch of geography put David Mark, Daniel Montello, Max J. Egenhofer, Andrew U Frank, Christian Freksa, Edward Tolman, and Barbara Tversky, among others.

Conference on Spatial Information view COSIT is a biennial international conference with a focus on the theoretical aspect of space and spatial information.

The US National Research Council published a book titled, “Learning to think spatially 2006” written by the Committee on assistance for Thinking Spatially. The committee believes that incorporating GIS and other spatial technologies in K–12 curriculum would promote spatial thinking and reasoning.

Origin and early works

The link between spatial cognition and human activity and survival exists from ancient times. As learned from etymology, geometry has its origins in land surveying of the annual floods of the Nile river. Spatial cognition developed from the examine of cognitive psychology which began to be considered as a separate field in the unhurried 1960s through Ulric Neisser’s book Cognitive Psychology 1967. Initially, research on spatial cognition was hindered due to many leading researchers believing that visual and spatial world could be explained using language processing. Later on, research on imagery showed that by reducing the report of the visual and spatial world into Linguistic communication researchers ignored ‘fascinating’ issues. Around the same time, geographers were studying how people perceived and remembered the geographical world.

Cognitive geography and behavioral geography score from early behaviorist workings such as Tolman's concepts of "cognitive maps". More cognitively oriented, these geographers focus on the cognitive processes underlying spatial reasoning, decision making, and behavior. More behaviorally oriented geographers are materialists and look at the role of basic learning processes and how they influence the landscape patterns or even group identity.

Examples of early working on Cognitive Geography add Tolman's "Cognitive maps in rats and men" compared the behavior of laboratory rats with the navigation and wayfinding abilities of humans. Similar work during that period dealt with the peoples’ perception of direction and spatial relations, for example, Americans typically think that South America is aligned directly south of North America when in fact near of South America is much further east. In the early 70s, the focus was on how to enhancement maps by providing useful information, delivering an understandable message, and making it more aesthetically pleasing.