Cognition of Geographic Space

"From driving the car to work to doing the shopping, our daily lives consist of a myriad of spatial behaviours - movements across and within spatial environments. Each day we make hundreds of complex spatial choices and spatial decisions. In the vast majority of cases we rely not on external references such as maps to make these choices but upon a previously acquired spatial understanding of the world in which we live - we rely upon our mind's spatial representation of the environment, our so-called 'cognitive map'. How we perceive our spatial environment, how our mind stores such information, and how we use it to make a wide variety of complex spatial decisions, are some of the concerns of cognitive mapping. These questions are fundamental for a wide range of disciplines and cognitive mapping has applications in environmental planning, cartography, transportation, migration, route learning and wayfinding, business location and consumer behaviour. In this first comprehensive overview for more than twenty years, Rob Kitchin and Mark Blades synthesize ideas and empirical findings from geography, planning, cartography, anthropology, computer science, psychology and cognitive science t