Knowledge about how people think about geographic space is fundamental to many of our activities. Geographic databases are built so that they can be used by people, and their utility depends on their content making sense to their users. To make this more likely, we must know how members of the expected user community conceptualize the phenomena being represented in the database, whether they are using an information system or not. Sound cognitive models are perhaps even more important at the level of the human–computer interface. In a sense, the interface is all the end users ever see of the system, and if the interface does not match human intuition, the system and the database are difficult to use, or even useless.
Spatial and geographic cognition are fundamental to the advancement of geographic information science. For this reason, "Cognitive Models of Geographic Space" was identified as one of the three Strategic Research Areas under the Varenius project.
2. Non-Varenius events related to Cognitive Models of Geographic Space, since October 1995
The following sections identify events that have taken place since the writing of the Varenius proposal in October 1995, and that represent significant developments in the domain of the Panel.
Specialist meeting of NCGIA Initiative 21, October 1996 (www.geog.buffalo.edu/ncgia/i21/)
Initiative 21, "Formal Models of Commonsense Geographic Worlds", held its Specialist Meeting in San Marcos, Texas, October 30–November 3, 1996. A report on the meeting has been published as NCGIA Technical Report 97-2, and is on the web, linked to the above Web page.
The major international event in geographic cognition and cognitive geography is now the series entitled "Conference on Spatial Information Theory" (COSIT). The third COSIT meeting was held at Laurel Highlands resort in western Pennsylvania in October 1997. The COSIT program is available on the Web at www.lis.pitt.edu/~cosit97. Four of the five members of the Varenius cognitive panel attended the meeting, as well as several Varenius initiative leaders. COSIT'97 had an excellent set of papers, and although attendance was lower than at the two previous European COSITs, the conference still drew many of the most important international figures in this research area. The COSIT'99 will be organized by Varenius cognitive panel member Christian Freksa, and will be held near Hamburg, Germany.
The panel met in Santa Barbara, May 2–3, 1997. All panel members attended, and we had very constructive discussions of the overall goals of the Varenius project in general, and the cognitive models area in particular. The topic "Formal Concepts of Geographic Detail" had already been described in proposals and addenda to NSF, and thus the role of the cognitive panel was to confirm that it would be conducted. The panel confirmed that this is an important and high priority topic for a Varenius project research initiative.
The panel then turned to topics for two new initiatives, and developed the following list of topics worthy of consideration. In alphabetical order, these are:
Formulation of proposed initiatives, and presentation to Advisory Board, August 1997
The following three initiatives were presented to the Advisory Board:
Scale and Detail in the Cognition of Geographic Information
Co-leaders - Reg Golledge and Dan Montello
Specialist Meeting - May 14-16 1998, Santa Barbara
Cognitive Models of Dynamic Geographic Phenomena and Representations
Co-leaders - Stephen Hirtle and Alan MacEachern
Specialist Meeting - October 1998, western Pennsylvania
Multiple Input Modes and Multiple Frames of Reference for Spatial Knowledge
Co-leaders - Scott Freundschuh and Holly Taylor
Specialist Meeting - January 1999, Santa Barbara
Details on these three initiatives are presented in the following sections.
SCALE AND DETAIL IN THE COGNITION OF GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION
LEADERS: Reginald Golledge and Daniel Montello, Geography, UC Santa Barbara
Core planning group:
Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Scale is one of the most fundamental yet poorly understood and confusing concepts underlying research involving geographic information. The term has multiple referents, including absolute size, relative size, resolution, granularity, and detail. This initiative focuses on explicating the multiple referents of scale and determining their consequences for thinking and decision-making involving geographic information. An emphasis will be placed on cognitive aspects of the scale problem as a complement to the traditional geographic and cartographic emphasis on scale in external representations. Basic questions to be pursued include: How do laypersons and experts conceptualize scale and scale-related phenomena, particularly given the multiple partially-related referents of the term? Do various geographic structures and processes come into existence at particular scales, and if so, how is this understood by users and consumers of geographic information? In what ways do laypersons and experts believe that phenomena are scale-independent or scale-dependent? What role does scale play in traditional arguments about form versus process? What are the difficulties inherent in communicating issues of scale, and what are more or less effective ways of accurately representing information about scale? Geographic information systems currently allow representing phenomena at multiple scales, and innovations in scale representation are constantly being developed. However, system developers do not pay much attention to issues of how scale communication impedes or facilitates valid communication of geographic phenomena; in particular, there is very little systematic research available to guide the development of such systems. As society makes the transition to the digital environment, associated metaphors for scale and scale transitions are likely to change as well. Map scale or representative fraction, the metric for scale in the traditional cartographic world, has no well-defined meaning in a digital world of seamless perspectives in which the user is free to zoom in or out at will. Can we identify the fundamental, invariant aspects of the concept of scale that survive the transition to the digital world? Can we identify their mappings to the concepts and metaphors currently used in naive and expert geography?
Central Research Issues:
1. Difficulty of comprehending scale translations on maps and other representations.
4. Effective maximization of presented detail in geographic representations.
5. Basic conceptual structure of scale, size, resolution, and detail as a function of user expertise.
7. Is knowledge derived at multiple scales combined or integrated, and if so, how?
8. Spatial knowledge from CRT vs. desktop VE vs. immersive VE.
9. Pattern extraction as a function of scale.
10. What is the relationship between scale and mental imagery?
11. Are there differences in the implications of scale of length, scale of width, and scale of height with respect to scene processing?
Proposals to participate in the workshop must be received by 20 January 1998 to ensure consideration. Information and updates about this meeting will be available on the World Wide Web at www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/varenius/scale/.
COGNITIVE MODELS OF DYNAMIC PHENOMENA AND THEIR REPRESENTATIONS
LEADERS:
The ability to manipulate, interpret, and store information about changing environments is a critical skill for human survival, and also is very important for geographic information science. Models of the cognitive aspects of dynamic spatial representations are necessary for understanding temporal and spatial changes in spaces or maps, for the manipulation of temporal geographic data, and for navigation through changing environments. Furthermore, the use of representational information may be dependent on the context of the problem, with different entity types resulting in the adoption of different spatial metaphors for reasoning and understanding. For example, land use change might be viewed as a series of changes in attributes of fixed locations, whereas an advancing forest fire may be thought of as a moving entity of changing shape and size. At a different temporal scale, the former process, involving no real motion, might be talked about, or reasoned about, as the ‘spread’ or ‘sprawl’ of development. Some other examples of dynamic geographic processes include navigation through changed environments, diffusion of diseases, and much slower processes such as glaciations, or continental drift and plate tectonics.
At a database level, we are concerned with issues such as forming discrete representations of continuous phenomena or continuous representations of discrete phenomena. Cartographically, the emphasis is on animation, but many methods have been used to show temporal phenomena in static maps. The use of dynamic and manipulable interfaces also must be investigated within the same conceptual framework used for observing dynamic phenomena in the real world.
This initiative takes a dual and parallel look at dynamic phenomena in geographic space itself, and at their representations in dynamic displays of geographic information. If research finds that there are systematic differences in human cognitive responses to various kinds of change and motion in geographic space, then different representations may be appropriate for the different situations. If different kinds of computer displays also trigger different kinds of human memory, reasoning, or decision-making, then the match between cognitive models for the phenomenon being represented and those for the display methods will influence how intuitive and usable the display will be.
MULTIPLE INPUT MODES AND MULTIPLE FRAMES
OF REFERENCE FOR SPATIAL KNOWLEDGE
LEADERS:
Space can be experienced directly, through vision, hearing, touch, and other modalities, as well as indirectly, primarily through language. Space can be viewed from many different perspectives, and conceived of from perspectives that have not or cannot be viewed. How do people interact with multiple modalities and multiple frames of reference? How do they integrate and reconcile the varied information, if and when they do? What are the relative advantages and disadvantages of each kind or source of spatial information? These are issues that have arisen in linguistics, philosophy, computer science, anthropology, and psychology, as well as in geography, in theoretical as well as in applied contexts. However, there are many open questions, especially with respect to human behavior and learning in natural situations. Understanding how people combine or juggle information from a variety of sources in a variety of forms is important to geographic information science and GIS in at least two ways. First, it is important in deciding how to provide additional information to system users, dependent in part upon what they already know. Second, the ways in which people represent and combine geographic information may help in the design of computerized systems to do the same thing.
Some specific topics serve as examples:
Since August, we have confirmed all Co-Leaders for the initiatives, and have exact or approximate dates and places for all three Specialist Meetings. The core planning group for 'Scale' has been appointed, and such groups are being formed for the other Initiatives. Core planning groups, sites, and dates for the other two Cognitive initiatives will be firm by February 1998.
4. Assessment of research progress within and outside Varenius pertinent to Cognitive Models of Geographic Space, relative to the research agenda as set out in the NCGIA NSF proposal of October 1995
Between now and February, members of the Cognitive Models of Geographic Space panel will be assessing progress in the area according to the following criteria: