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Cognitive Cartography
Cognitive cartography or “mental mapping” is the mental abilities human beings have to collect, organize, store, recall and manipulate information about the spatial environment. It’s “the ability that allows us to cope with the problems of understanding the spatial environment within which we live” (Downs and Stea, 1977). It’s part of people’s fundamental need to know where people and things are in order to survive.

Many researchers agree the ability to map cognitively continues to develop as a child becomes an adult. A child learns there is more than one way to solve a “wayfinding” problem. Wayfinding describes the process of how a person finds his way from one location on the earth’s surface to another.

History
The idea of a cognitive map was first developed by the psychologist Edward Tolman in 1948. In his famous lab rats experiments—he sent rats through different kinds of mazes to food in a goal box. He notated how the rats changed their process as they were sent through the different mazes. Planners and geographers re-ignited the cognitive mapping field in the early 1960s and 1970s. Today the field is highly interdisciplinary with researchers in psychology, anthropology, sociology,, children’s studies, urban studies, psychiatry, architecture and design and geography involved.

Geographers’ Cognitive Cartography Interests Today
Geographers, in general, are interested in the construction of mental representations of towns, cities, neighborhoods, metropolitan areas, landscapes, etc. They want to know how we know the world-- how we make sense of it or organize it in our minds and how we communicate it to people.

Transportation Geographers are getting involved in “path planning” to help tourists’ travel planning and route selection. Path planning is defined as the task of finding efficient and computationally inexpensive paths through existing networks (Golledge, 2003). They’re building “Computational Process Models (CPM) which are based on cognitive maps as a means of determining alternatives for destination choice. These models have led to the building of Travel Behavior Simulators. Already the NAVIGATOR system used in cars were produced using the CPM model in recent years.

Geo-education involves cognitive behavioral geographers who look at how children develop spatial knowledge and how spatial abilities develop over time. The psychologists Liben and Downs have been at the forefront of this part of the field. They’ve been looking at the development of map concepts in children.

Wayfinding on the Web involves finding new, easy strategies for people to browse the internet.

Geographic Information Science (GISc) research is increasingly interested in the spatial visual layouts that the most number of people can comprehend easily. Michael Wood says today’s interactive online technologies which allow people to create their own maps quickly makes this issue all the more important

Imagery Debate: How the brain processes visual imagery
Cognitive studies done in the 60s, 70s and 80s indicate human beings have pre-conceptual cognitive structures in their brains—or “cognitive primitives”, that there are basic level categories of things such as landmarks, paths, ,nodes, district and barriers as well as “image-schemas” such as container, center-periphery, source-path-destination based on the body’s interaction with the physical world (Portugali/Couclelis, p. 142).

Reginald Golledge points out the most recent findings in cognitive mapping. He says spatial knowledge appears to be hierarchical, much spatially-stored knowledge has a regional component and that learning from maps produces better layout knowledge than learning from routes. (Golledge, 2003).