Abstract
Human spatial cognition appears to operate differently in manipulable (small scale) spaces and in geographic (large scale) spaces. Although some fundamental spatial concepts may apply for both kinds of spaces, the relative salience of the concepts may be quite different. Geographic information systems (GIS) represent geographic spaces and the entities in them, but users interact with these systems as if they were manipulable, through representations that appear in manipulable spaces. This difference in scales of representation and action is not new, as people have long reasoned about geographic spaces while looking at or remembering graphical maps, which, like GIS displays and equipment, are manipulable entities. Part of the power and utility of maps comes from their natural space-in-space representations, but since geographic and manipulable spaces are different in how people think and reason about them, graphical maps to some extent misrepresent the geographic spaces that they show. Montello captured the essence of this dilemma when he asserted:
Maps represent [geographical] spaces, but are themselves instances of [manipulable] space...[he] therefore expect[s] the psychological study of map use to draw directly on the psychology of [manipulable] space rather than on the psychology of [geographical] space. [14, p. 315]
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Mark, D.M., Freundschuh, S.M. (1995). Spatial Concepts and Cognitive Models for Geographic Information Use. In: Nyerges, T.L., Mark, D.M., Laurini, R., Egenhofer, M.J. (eds) Cognitive Aspects of Human-Computer Interaction for Geographic Information Systems. NATO ASI Series, vol 83. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0103-5_3
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