Image and Environment

Cognitive Mapping and Spatial Behavior

David Stea, David Stea

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351513630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Ökologie

Cognitive mapping is a construct that encompasses those processes that enable people to acquire, code, store, recall, and manipulate information about the nature of their spatial environment. It refers to the attributes and relative locations of people and objects in the environment, and is an essential component in the adaptive process of spatial decision-making--such as finding a safe and quick route to from work, locating potential sites for a new house or business, and deciding where to travel on a vacation trip.

Cognitive processes are not constant, but undergo change with age or development and use or learning. Image and Environment, now in paperback, is a pioneer study. It brings a new academic discipline to a wide audience. The volume is divided into six sections, which represent a comprehensive breakdown of cognitive mapping studies: "Theory"; "Cognitive Representations"; "Spatial Preferences"; "The Development of Spatial Cognition"; "Geographical and Spatial Orientation"; and "Cognitive Distance." Contributors include Edward Tolman, James Blaut, Stephen Kaplan, Terence Lee, Donald Appleyard, Peter Orleans, Thomas Saarinen, Kevin Cox, Georgia Zannaras, Peter Gould, Roger Hart, Gary Moore, Donald Griffin, Kevin Lynch, Ulf Lundberg, Ronald Lowrey, and Ronald Briggs.

II

Cognitive Representations

Introduction

All research areas pass through the classification stage in which phenomena are discovered, grouped, labeled, and described. This stage, though only the forerunner for the more significant stages of analysis, modeling, and theory building, is complex and confusing. The complexity and confusion come from hasty and ill-defined groupings, misleading or ambiguous labels, and the use of “imported” labels which have unwarranted connotations. The field of cognitive mapping is no stranger to these problems. There is a fundamental confusion over terminology which we must discuss in order to understand cognitive representations.

We are faced with a series of terms—cognitive map, mental map, spatial (or environmental) image—which refer to a cognitive representation of the nature and attributes of the spatial environment. Initially, we followed Boulding (1956) and Lynch (1960) in the use of the term “spatial image.” However, just as we had dropped the term “environmental perception” (in its geographical, not psychological usage) in favor of environmental cognition, we also dropped the restrictive term spatial image for the more general concept of cognitive representation and the specific term cognitive map. Spatial imagery was a misleading and restrictive label, and we must clarify the sources of confusion, in addition to exploring cognitive representations themselves.

The confusion is two-fold, centering on the form of cognitive representation implied by the term spatial imagery, and on the relationship between the use of the term in a spatial context and in psychology. Although there is confusion over the form of representation implied by spatial imagery, its function is clear. Both Boulding (1956) and Lynch (1960) are explicit about the adaptive function of imagery in determining spatial behavior, a function illustrated as follows:

(Vicki Folsom) once applied imagery to help her master left-hand driving before touring England and Scotland. In flight and just before falling asleep, she saw herself in a car designed for left-hand drive. She drove the roads, imagining she was coming out of a one-way street, entering into complicated turns or traffic patterns. “And,” she added with a grin, “the system really works.” (Wells, 1971, p. 24)

Lynch (1960, p. 8) argues that the image is used to interpret information; to guide action; to serve as a broad frame of reference within which a person can organize activity, belief, and knowledge; to serve as a basis for individual growth; and to give a sense of emotional security.

As a heuristic, the term spatial (or environmental) image has been of inestimable value in focusing and organizing research. Since Lynch’s Image of the City has generated the most subsequent research, we return to him for a description:

Environmental images are the result of a two-way process between the observer and his environment. The environment suggests distinctions and relations and the observer—with great adaptability and in the light of his own purposes—selects, organizes, and endows with meaning what he sees. The image so developed now limits what is seen, while the image itself is being tested against the filtered perceptual input in a constant interacting process. (1960, p. 6)

In this description, however, lies a major source of confusion. It is unfortunate that Lynch emphasizes the “seeing” aspect of imagery, leading some workers to equate imagery with the cognitive equivalent of vision, and yielding as one result confusion between environmental perception and cognition. A cognitive spatial representation (or image) depends upon more than visual input—it is an integrated, multimodal representation (see chap. 1). The confusion resulting from this misplaced emphasis is increased by Lynch’s definition of imageability as:

that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer. It is that shape, color, or arrangement which facilitates the making of vividly identified, powerfully structured, highly useful mental images of the environment. It might also be called legibility, or perhaps visibility in a heightened sense, where objects are not only able to be seen, but are presented sharply and intensely to the senses. (1960, p. 9)

The research tradition generated by Lynch is represented in contributions by Francescato and Mebane, and Orleans (chaps. 7 and 8). A major criticism of Lynch’s original study centered on the nature and selection of the sample of respondents. Francescato and Mebane, in their comparative study of two Italian cities, obtained samples two to four times the size employed by Lynch, and divided their samples by age level, socioeconomic class, and length of residence in the city.

Orleans brings a much-needed sociological perspective to research on urban cognition in his study of Los Angeles, in which residents of five different socioeconomic areas were asked to draw maps of the entire city. Five different sets of responses were obtained, and Orleans relates these differences to existing sociological theory and knowledge of urban spatial behavior. He discusses the relevance and problems of using Lynch-type mapping procedures in research on differences in environmental cognition.

Having discussed one source of confusion over the term “imagery,” we must turn to the second source and distinguish between imagery as used in psychology (see Bower, 1970; Holt, 1964; and Richardson, 1969), and in geography and planning. This is important since the geographic and planning use is frequently made without reference to the existing theory and findings in psychology.

The traditional psychological referent for an image was a perceived stimulus or complex of stimuli, and hence such phenomena as “afterimages” could be traced to physiological processes. Holt (1964) argues that imagery is a generic term for all conscious, subjective representations of a quasi-sensory but nonperceptual character, and does not include “after-imagery” within his definition. Richardson (1969) supports Holt, and claims that no qualitative or quantitative attributes definitely differentiate images from percepts, since psychologically “normal” people sometimes cannot make the distinction. Richardson (1969) distinguishes among forms of imagery which have traditionally been studied—after-, eidetic, memory, and imagination imagery—along the dimensions of vividness, controllability, and stimulus dependency.

In contrast, the spatial or environmental image has remained a vague and ill-defined concept, having neither a clearly physiological nor a purely perceptual base. Its major components are memory and imagination imagery, and it is, by empirical definition or usage, a pictorialization of the cognitive map. But a more detailed breakdown of what Boulding (1956) refers to as the “image of man” is possible. Although we are only concerned with certain aspects of this image, Boulding has identified seven components:

The spatial image, the picture of the individual’s location in the space around him … the temporal image, his picture of the stream of time and his place in it … the relational image, his picture of the universe around him as a system of regularities … the personal image [placing] the individual in the midst of the universe of persons, roles and organizations … the value image [consisting of] ordering on the scale of better or worse [different] parts of the whole image … the affectional image, or emotional image, by which various [parts] of the image are imbued with feeling or affect. (1956, pp. 47–48; emphasis mine)

Boulding (1956) also identifies three dimensions of imagery: (1) certainty to uncertainty; (2) reality to unreality; and (3) public to private. These deal with the clarity of the image, its correspondence with “outside reality,” and the degree to which it is shared by others.

One reason why our ignorance of the structure and function of cognitive representations dissipates slowly is that the present primitive state of theory and methodology allows us to get at parts of the representation but not at the total. The model for cognitive mapping research has thus far viewed the individual as a “black box” and examined the output to the exclusion of input variables. We know something about the response, but nothing about the stimulus. We have no idea how spatial information is processed (although we know something about the products of the transformation), how environments are learned (although we know something of the development of spatial cognition), and of inter- and intracultural differences in representation. Applications to environmental design and decision making have been scarce; exceptions include Appleyard (1969a) and Steinitz (1968). These questions will remain unanswered if the terminological confusion surrounding the classification stage of research into cognitive mapping is not resolved.

We shall distinguish between cognitive representations, or images, generated by behavior and those generating behavior (Stea, 1969). Generated maps or representations are those of the Lynch variety; people’s perceptions and actions result in differing cognitive representations of the environment. Generating maps are those which, intentionally or unintentionally, cause people to view the environment in certain ways. The classic example of the generating cartographic map is the Mercator projection centering on the Western Hemisphere, and the consequent difficulty that many adults experience, because of childhood exposure to this projection, in cognizing Greenland as smaller than South America. Similar cartographic conventions, such as locating North at the top of the map, cause difficulty, and make polar projections practically unrecognizable to the general public.

Generated Cognitive Representations

A number of investigators have followed the lead of Lynch, producing studies of the “urban images” of cities throughout the world. Kates (1970) has provided a tabulation of these studies and their results (see table II.1).

A distinction must be made between two empirical questions concerning generated representations of urban areas; how these representations are formed and what is represented. The studies summarized by Kates (1970) produced results predominantly addressed to the latter question; only a few (e.g. Follini, 1966; Appleyard, 1970; Gittins, 1969) have explicitly addressed the former. Of the other selections in this section, the contributions of Saarinen (chap. 9) and Lee (chap. 5) are also of the “what” variety.

Saarinen’s approach is methodologically close to Lynch. His technique of requesting free-hand maps or the identification of areas on an outline map of the world resembles Lynch’s map-drawing and place-naming, but he adds another class of interpretation to that employed by Lynch. Saarinen investigates locational imagery, asking whether things are “correctly” placed, whether they are in conjunction with other things; in other words, he is questioning the accuracy of the location as well as the nature of attributes.

By asking subjects to draw the boundaries of their neighborhoods, Lee makes important inroads into problems of areal imagery and lays the groundwork for his own later investigations (Lee, 1968) and those of Steinitz (1968) and Stea and Wood (forthcoming). Lee’s paper is one of the most imaginative and thought-provoking approaches to environmental cognition, and is included because it deserves greater recognition than its original publication source allowed.

Cox and Zannaras (chap. 10) take the United States as their cognitive area. As in Gould (see chap. 11), the resulting map is generated by the researchers from the subject’s nonspatial responses to locations; however, neither study assumes or attempts to assess the subjects’ total cognitive maps. Unlike Gould, Cox and Zannaras generate a map from an index of cognized similarity rather than preference. From subjects’ judgments as to which three states of the United States are most similar to a given state, they arrive at locational classes for student “schemata” of the U.S.A., and apply the same technique to an analysis of sixty cities of the United States and Canada.

Generating Cognitive Representations

Maps indicate much more than cartographic truth or environmental imagery of the distant historic past. Today, they serve as powerful indicators of nationalism, self-image, attitudes, and aspirations. Variations are introduced in the existence or weight of lines used to indicate national boundaries or in the contrast between hues used to represent different nations. Most of the discussion in this book has been restricted to images of a single nation, subnational area, urban region, or city. The way in which national images and aspirations come into play cannot be understood without considering cartographic representations of larger entities: multinational groupings.

Guatemalan maps of Guatemala have depicted for more than 100 years what other nations call “British Honduras” a...