Cognitive Geography and Geographical Cognition

Geography 592:

Cognitive Geography and Geographical Cognition

Instructor: David M. Mark

This course will provide an overview of topics in spatial cognition and perception. Topics will include map perception, wayfinding and navigation, behavioral geography, categories of geographic things,spatial relations, and environmental 'perception'. We will also examine how human natural languages represent and express spatial concepts. Implications for applications such as vehicle navigation systems, and both database contents and user interfaces for geographic information systems will also be examined.

FACTS ABOUT THE COURSES

SPRING 2004 INFORMATION: GEO 592

TIMETABLE: Geography 592 meets twice a week (Tu & Th), from 11:00 am to 12:20 pm.

CREDIT HOURS: 3

GRADING: Two non-cumulative short-essay tests will each be worth 30 % of the grade, a term paper (due April 30 2004) will be worth 30 %, and a research presentation to the class will be worth 10 %.

Course Outline

January 13 (Tu) 1. Introduction

Discussion of course objectives and requirements.

· January 15 (Th) 2. "Cognitive Science" and Cognitive Geography; Cognition and Language

A brief introduction to this field which combines the more computational and formal aspects of cognitive psychology and related behavioral sciences with the theoretical or explanatory side of artificial intelligence.

January 20 (Tu) 3. Gibson: The Environment for Perception and Cognition
January 22 (Th) 4. Grano: Dividing the Human Environment into Landscape and Proximity

January 27 (Tu) 5. Ontology, Epistemology, and Cognition

Smith and Mark: Geographic Ontology article (pdf)

January 29 (Th) 6. Ontological Foundations for Cognitive Geography

February 3 (Tu) 7 On Size and Scale in Cognition

1. Zubin, Montello, etc.

2. Freundschuh and Egenhofer article

February 5 (Th) (DMM away)

February 10 (Tu) 8. Human Subjects Research; Designing Experiments; Ethnography

February 12 (Th) 9. Typologies of Spatial Knowledge

Freundschuh's typology. Related ideas

February 17 (Tu) 10. Cultural Differences in Spatial Cognition
February 19 (Th) 11. Behavioral Geography and Environmental 'Perception'

How economic and social/cultural geographers have included mental models of geographic space in the research. Golledge; others. Choice models. Hierarchical models of space.
Environmental 'perception' is a 'mis-named' sub-field of geography. Particularly has been concerned with hazards, how people think about natural hazards and react to them.

February 24 (Tu) 12. 'Mental Maps'

Previous research in geography. Gould and White's book. Kuipers' work. Do 'mental maps' or 'cognitive maps' have to be 'map- like'? Tversky's 'cognitive collage'.

February 26 (Th) TEST #1

March 2 (Tu) 13 Navigation and Wayfinding
March 4 (Th) 14 Spatial Categories: Entity Types and Feature Codes

· Smith, B., and Mark, D. M., 1998. Ontology and Geographic KindsProceedings, Eighth International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling, Vancouver, British Columbia.

· Mark, D. M., Smith, B., and Tversky, B., 1999. Ontology and Geographic Objects: An Empirical Study of Cognitive Categorization In Freksa, C., and Mark, D. M., editors, Spatial Information Theory: A Theoretical Basis for GIS, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Sciences, pp. 283-298.

March 9 (Tu) 15 Spatial Categories, continued

Mark, D. M., and Turk, A. G., 2003. Landscape Categories in Yindjibarndi: Ontology, Environment, and Language. In Kuhn, W., Worboys, M., and Timpf, S., Editors, Spatial Information Theory: Foundations of Geographic Information Science, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 2825, pp. 31-49.