Wayfinding Behavior

The metaphor of a "cognitive map" has attracted wide interest since it was first proposed in the late 1940s. Researchers from fields as diverse as psychology, geography, and urban planning have explored how humans process and use spatial information, often with a view to explaining why people make way-finding errors or what makes one person a better navigator than another. But there has also been an intense debate among biologists over whether animals have cognitive maps or have other forms of internal spatial representations that allow them to behave as if they did. Yet until now, little has been done to relate research on human and nonhuman subjects in this area. In Wayfinding Behavior: Cognitive Mapping and Other Spatial Processes Reginald G. Golledge brings together a distinguished group of scholars to offer a unique and comprehensive survey of current research in diverse fields.

First sentence: This first section explores the strong theoretical and empirical links between cognitive maps (or the internal representation of environmental information), the cognitive mapping process itself, the internal manipulation of information in the form of spatial choice and decision making, and the directed acts of human wayfinding through simple or complex environments.

Year

1998

Language

English

Publisher

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Editions

1

Pages

448

ISBN

9780801859939

Data source: Wikidata