Perceptual Region

10 Key excerpts on "Perceptual Region"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  Foundations of Geographic Information Science

  • Matt Duckham, Michael F. Goodchild, Michael Worboys, Matt Duckham, Michael F. Goodchild, Michael Worboys(Authors)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  Dubuque, IA: Wm. C. Brown Publishers. Foundations of geographic information science 190 region that “stands out in one’s mind” or is “distinctive.” This type label has not found widespread usage in geography, probably because its definition as a separate type is not coherent. Instead, texts in human geography often refer to Perceptual Regions. A Perceptual Region is defined as “a region that only exists as a conceptualization or an idea and not as a physically demarcated entity,” “a region perceived to exist by its inhabitants or the general populace,” or “an area defined by subjective perceptions that reflect the feelings and images about key place characteristics.” First, beliefs, concepts, attitudes, and memories are more properly termed cognitive rather than perceptual, perception being a subset of cognition that technically refers only to the acquisition of knowledge of local surrounds via the senses. The geographers’ broad use of the term perception, as in the subdiscipline of “environmental perception,” has been questioned before; to be fair, using it this way has precedence in the common-sense metaphorical extension of the word, as in “I see what you mean.” Another difficulty is that standard definitions of Perceptual Regions typically state or imply that such regions are not “real” like other regions are. The Accountant and the Swineherd consider that point below. Finally, an important aspect of many definitions is the degree to which they imply that Perceptual Regions are socially shared. Examples of Perceptual Regions always focus on widely held conceptions such as “the South” or “the Bible Belt.” In fact, it is useful to recognize that cognitive regions may be idiosyncratic to one or two individuals (such as “our meeting place in parking lot 12”) or shared among members of some social or cultural group.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Sensuous Geographies

  Body, Sense and Place

  • Paul Rodaway(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  (‘-graphe’). It is a representation of an experienced world, both perceived directly through the senses and mediated by the mind. Perception as a process by which data is collected and ordered is therefore fundamental to geographical enquiry. Geographical perception is simply the perception of a world around us, of spatial relationships and the identification of distinctive places—to recognise our situation in a world and to have a sense of a world. Sensuous geography—as a focus on the role of the senses—might be located in the sub-field of perception studies.

  In general, geographers have been somewhat uncritical in their use of the term ‘perception’ and have drawn heavily upon a limited range of psychological theories whilst not generally taking account of the critical traditions underlying these theories. A move from a psychological and biological interest in perception processes to a geographical one is far more fundamental than was originally realised. Geographical interest is in perception in complex everyday environments and decision-making in widely differing socio-economic and cultural contexts. These wider issues of perception call for a distinctive geographical formulation of perception models.

  There have been numerous reviews and collections of ‘perception geography’ (e.g. Wood 1970 ; Gold 1980 ;

  Saarinen et al. 1984

  ; Aitken 1991 ). Some reference has been made to ethnocentric and eurocentric views of the world (e.g. Tuan 1974 ), but in general this dimension has been given little attention. The behavioural or perceived environment (Kirk 1963 ) has been, with hindsight, perhaps the most influential concept to develop out of the interest of geographers in perception. This suggests that individuals and groups do not make decisions based on full, accurate and objective knowledge of their environment, but a more partial, less accurate and subjective view of their environment derived from the mediation of previous experience, education and social conditioning, and expectations and hopes. Behavioural decisions are made on the basis on this environment as perceived (Brookfield 1969

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Human Geography

  People, Place, and Culture

  • Erin H. Fouberg, Alexander B. Murphy(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  When a news report says something happened “in the Middle East,” we have perceptions of where the Middle East is and what the region looks like. Our Perceptual Regions can change over time. Before September 11, 2001, most Americans thought the Middle East region included Iraq and Iran, but stretched no farther east. As the hunt for Osama bin Laden began and the media focused attention on the harsh rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan, perceptions of the Middle East changed. For many Americans, their perceptions of the Middle East stretched east to include Afghanistan and Pakistan. Scholars who specialize in this part of the globe had long studied the relationship among parts of Central Asia, South Asia, and the traditional “Middle East,” but prior to 9/11 the connections between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the rest of the Middle East were almost invisible to most Americans. Perceptual Regions are also called vernacular regions. A vernacular is a local language people use to communicate. A vernacular region is a Perceptual Region that has such strong significance to the people in the Perceptual Region that it becomes the lens through which they see their world and a way people identify themselves. For example, if Cajun people identify strongly with a Cajun region in Louisiana, they may see things happening at the scale of Louisiana or the scale of the U.S. in terms of how the happenings impact Cajun country. Driving through the Cajun region, you may see signs saying things like “This is Cajun country!” or “Welcome to Cajun country.” By calling themselves a region and identifying strongly with that region, the Perceptual Region of Cajun country has become vernacular—part of the language used to make sense of the people and the place. Perceptual Regions in the United States Cultural geog- rapher Wilbur Zelinsky analyzed the names businesses chose in major cities to identify 12 Perceptual Regions in the United States and southern Canada.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Economic and Social Geography

  • R. Knowles, J. Wareing(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Made Simple

    (Publisher)

  As a result, different people respond to the same stimuli in different ways. Secondly, it is the image of the environment that each individual carries inside his head. This mental model is very important because it is the frame of reference within which man behaves, and is of considerable interest to the geographer. The process of perception and its consequent mental model are affected by two basic considerations: the individual's personal view of the environment, and the influence of culture on this view. Each individual has his own view of the world and his own personal sense of space that is produced by his own inner feelings and drives. This personal space can be seen in Fig. 2.1, but of much more importance to the geographer is the influence of culture on the individual's view of the world, and the ways in which perceptions of the environment vary between cultures are a major focus of interest. 12 Environmental Perception and Behaviour 13 Far Places far Places Fig. 2.1. A simplified mental map. (from B. Ooodey, Perception of the Environment, Centre for Urban and Regional Studies. 1971) Because the real world presents the individual with so many images, choices and problems, a process of selection has to take place, and it is culture which enables him to choose certain stimuli and to arrange them into patterns which have meaning. As a result, reality is only perceived through a selective cultural filter which consists of philosophical considerations, social traditions, econo-mic aims and so on. This cultural filter is learned, so that it is possible to identify cultural responses to the environment which are shared by all its individual members, and patterns of activity which are culturally recognisable, such as cultural landscapes, are produced. Culture is the primary factor affecting the way in which man responds to the environment and since there is a wide variety of cultures, there is a wide variety of cultural responses, even to the same environment.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Geographic Thought

  A Critical Introduction

  • Tim Cresswell(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4 Thinking About Regions

  • Approaching the Region
  • Critiquing the Region
  • New Regional Geographies
  • Critical Regionalism
  • Conclusion

  The regional concept constitutes the core of geography. This concept holds that the face of the earth can be marked off into areas of distinctive character; and that the complex patterns and associations of phenomena in particular places possess a legible meaning as an ensemble which, added to the meanings derived from a study of all the parts and processes separately, provides additional perspective and additional depth of understanding. This focus of attention on particular places for the purpose of seeking a more complete understanding of the face of the earth has been the continuous, unbroken theme of geographic study through the ages.

  (James 1929 : 195)

  Two questions have motivated geographical thinking over the past 2,000 years more than any others. These are “what is the connection between the human and physical worlds?” and “how can we account for spatial difference?” The second of these questions lay at the heart of what Varenius called “special geography” with its focus on particular areas of the earth's surface and the qualities that make these areas different and unique from the areas around them. It is this line of enquiry that lies at the heart of human geography over the first half of the twentieth century. The concept that exemplifies this pursuit is region. At first glance the idea of a region seems a fairly vague one. It might, for instance, be thought of as a synonym for “area.” One question that immediately arises is at what scale a region exists. As a word that is used in everyday speech, it most often suggests a subdivision of something bigger. Regional art, for instance, signifies artistic practices, styles, and products that are associated with a particular bit of a nation – say the Midwest of the United States. But we would be unlikely to label a national art form regional even if a nation is part of a larger continental or global whole. We can even think of a house as having particular regions if we happen to be a sociologist trained in the work of Erving Goffman who might describe the living room, drawing room, or lounge of a house as the “front region” while the kitchen or bedrooms are part of the “back region” – not for public consumption (Goffman 1956

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Mental Maps

  Geographical and Historical Perspectives

  • Janne Holmén, Norbert Götz(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The widespread use of continents in cartographic representations has established their prominent position in contemporary representations of the world: they are one of the principal forms of meta-geography (Lewis and Wigen 1997), the set of spatial structures through which individuals order their knowledge of the world. Continents, therefore, fall within the production of regionalization that we use to organize incomplete and often imprecise world knowledge and to manage our limited abilities of memorization (Ellard 2009) through the process of categorization, a universal characteristic of human thought (Montello 2003). Mental maps research at global level was initiated by T.F. Saarinen with the aim of demonstrating the variety of points of view of the world or of testing the level of geographic knowledge on some samples of the world’s population (Saarinen and MacCabe 1995, Saarinen 1998). These analyses were most often qualitative and focused on the centering of maps according to the place of residence of the people surveyed (Saarinen 1987) or on the number and size of the countries drawn. Pinheiro (1998) sought to explain the frequency of representations of location via statistical approaches based on the gravity model. Vernacular regions are defined by those who perceive them through a broad range of criteria, such as visual appearance, specific activities, ethnic composition, and many other characteristics not strictly related to spatial cognition (Kuipers 1978). They are created by using and mixing various sources of information (Battersby and Montello 2009 ; Friedman 2009). The locations of these regions cannot necessarily be ascertained with precision, precisely because they are not rooted in any sort of objective criteria. Indeed, one of the characteristics of vernacular regions is their fuzziness and impreciseness

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Running the Numbers: A Practical Guide to Regional Economic and Social Analysis: 2014

  A Practical Guide to Regional Economic and Social Analysis

  • John Quinterno(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4

  Few residents of the Research Triangle would deny that it is a region of some sort, but many would contest its boundaries and its degree of interconnectedness. The Research Triangle nevertheless is a region in that it is “an area within the national economy that is sufficiently comprehensive in structure that it can function independently, although of course in most practical circumstances it has strong links with the rest of the economy.”5 Yet even that definition is vague, and in response, observers tend to view regions from one of three perspectives: territorial, functional, or administrative.

  Before describing each perspective, it is important to acknowledge that each one is more complex than its description implies. An exhaustive account is beyond this book’s scope, and the intention here is to provide a basic orientation to common ways of understanding regions. In practice, most regional studies blend the functional and administrative perspectives for reasons of feasibility and because civic leaders tend to think in terms of administrative structures. The exact mix of perspectives, however, hinges on the particular research questions and the availability of pertinent data.

  TERRITORIAL PERSPECTIVE

  The territorial perspective envisions a region as a “historically evolved, contiguous society that possesses a physical environment, a socioeconomic, political, and cultural milieu, and a spatial structure distinct from the other major territorial units, city, and nation.”6 The strength of this view is its recognition of the interplay between the physical environment and social dynamics. Regions are not simply discrete physical spaces, but rather the intricate products of economic and social interactions. Economic factors are particularly important in differentiating regions, as evidenced in the journalist Tom Wolfe’s observation about how when traveling by road in the United States “the only way you could tell you were leaving one community and entering another was when the franchises started repeating, and you spotted another 7-Eleven, another Wendy’s, another Costco, another Home Depot.”7

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The People, Place, and Space Reader

  • Jen Jack Gieseking, William Mangold, Cindi Katz, Setha Low, Susan Saegert, Jen Jack Gieseking, William Mangold, Cindi Katz, Setha Low, Susan Saegert(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 Human Perception and Environmental Experience

  Psychological map of Paris.

  Referenced in: Milgram, Stanley and Denise Jodelet. 1970. “Psychological Maps of Paris” in H.M. Proshansky, et al., eds., Environmental Psychology: People and their Physical Setting. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

  Perception describes the multiple ways in which people receive information from their surroundings, allowing them to know their environment. Cognition, or the way people understand the environment, occurs through immediate sensory experience coupled with memories and experiences from the past. While psychologists often treat these as different phenomena or faculties, the papers in this section challenge that bifurcation. Psychological studies of perception and cognition look at how we organize, identify, and interpret information through our senses. Other experiments, including projects by artists and designers, have shed light on how we attach meaning to particular places and spaces. Ecological psychology and other interdisciplinary research has demonstrated that human beings and their environments are produced in relation with one another. In this way, knowledge and experience are situated in the interplay between person and environment. Specific places and moments generate particular knowledge and experiences; previous experiences shade understandings and lead people to recognize particular things or respond in specific ways.

  Traditionally, the environment was thought of as the context for or container of human activity, and many areas of psychology have proceeded as if what is “out there” in the environment is perceived by humans “in” our brains. However, John Dewey's (1896) landmark critique of the reflex arc denied the separation between external stimulus and internal response by showing the interrelatedness of events, environments, people, and actions. By the mid-20th century, psychologist Kurt Lewin's (1997 [1943] ) concept of the lifespace described how elements of the environment make up a sort of force field within which people live their lives. Lewin felt that the social and physical environment or field

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The World Today

  Concepts and Regions in Geography

  • Jan Nijman, Peter O. Muller, Harm J. de Blij(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  This observation would seem obvious, but there is more to this idea than meets the eye. Regions may be intellectual constructs, but they are not abstractions: they exist in the real world, and they occupy space on the Earth’s surface. • Boundaries It follows that regions have boundaries. Occa- sionally, nature itself draws sharp dividing lines, for instance, along the crest of a mountain range or along a coast. More often, regional boundaries are not self-evident, and we must determine them using criteria that we establish for that pur- pose. For example, to define a cultural region, we may decide that only areas where more than 50 percent of the population belong to a particular religion or speak a certain language qual- ify to be part of that region. • Location All regions also possess location. Often the name of a region contains a locational clue, as in Amazon Basin or Indochina (a region of Southeast Asia lying between India and China). Geographers refer to the absolute location 7 of a place or region by providing the latitudinal and longitudinal extent of the region with respect to the Earth’s grid coordinates. A more useful measure is a region’s relative location 8 , that is, its location with reference to other regions. Again, the names of certain regions reveal aspects of their relative locations, as in Mainland Southeast Asia and Equatorial Africa. • Homogeneity Many regions are marked by a certain homoge- neity or sameness. Homogeneity may lie in a region’s cultural properties, its physical characteristics, or both. Siberia, a vast region of northeastern Russia, is marked by a sparse human population that resides in widely scattered, small settlements of similar form, frigid climates, extensive areas of permafrost (permanently frozen subsoil), and cold-adapted vegetation. This dominant uniformity makes it one of Russia’s natural and cultural regions, extending from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Landscape Planning

  • Murat Ozyavuz(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • IntechOpen

    (Publisher)

  The definition of ELC puts an emphasis on the perceptual dimension of the landscape. Since landscape involves a subjective experience, it encompasses a perceptive, artistic and existential meaning (Antrop, 2005). Figure 1 shows the components of a landscape, which hence influence perception of the landscape. There is a mutual relationship between individual and the surrounding environment. People are intrinsically involved with their living environments to survive. They use and shape the physical environment to meet their physical and social needs. While environments are shaped by people, people are inspired and shaped by their environments as well. Thus, perception of the environment or the landscape has become an area of concern of various disciplines in order to understand and explain this interaction between people and their physical settings. Landscape Planning 252 Perception is the process in which information is derived through senses, organized and interpreted. It is an active process which takes place between the organism and environment (Hilgard, 1951 in R. Kaplan & S. Kaplan, 1978). S. Kaplan (1975) states that information is central to organism’s survival and essential in making sense out of the environment, to which perception is assumed to be oriented. Perception of our environment helps us to understand and react to our environment. Environmental perception is different to object perception in many ways (Forster, 2010; Ungar, 1999);  The components of the environment are diverse and complex. Therefore perception of the environment is not immediate and it takes time.  Scale affects perception of the environment. Environments are larger and, hence more complex systems.  Environment surrounds people. Thus it is perceived and experienced from inside.  Navigation skills are needed in environmental perception.  People usually interact with their environment for a purpose. As a result, we select spatial information related to our purpose.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book