First published in 1983. This is a volume in a series on Child Psychology. This book offers a set of theoretical ideas which make up a quite general theory of the mental representation of space which accounts both for much of spatial perception but also much of spatial thought. The system is general and economical and can be readily applied to novel problems as we illustrated in regard to Piaget’s water level problem and Koler’s letter recognition problem.

and processes which are exclusive to humans in their encoding, storing, decoding and retrieving spatial knowledge for various tasks. The authors present and discuss connectionist models of cognitive maps which are based on local representation, versus models which are based on distributed representation, as well as connectionist models concerning language and spatial relations. As is well known, Gibson's (1979) ecological approach suggests a view on cognition which is diametrically different from the classical main stream view: perception (and thus cognition) is direct, immediate and needs no internal information processing, and is thus essentially an external process of interaction between an organism and its external environment. The chapter by Harry Heft introduces J. J. Gibson's ecological approach and its implication to the construction of cognitive maps in general and to the issue of wayfinding in particular. According to Heft, main stream cognitive sciences are essentially Cartesian in nature and have not as yet internalized the implications of Darwin's theory of evolution. Gibson, in his ecological approach, has tried to do exactly this. The author introduces the basic terminology of the ecological approach and relates its various notions, in particular optic flow, nested hierarchy and affordances, to navigation and the way routes and places in the environment are learned.

Coping with spatial expressions in a plausible manner is a crucial problem in a number of research fields, specifically cognitive science, artificial intelligence, psychology, and linguistics. This volume contains a set of theoretical analyses as well as accounts of applications which deal with the problems of representing and processing spatial expressions. These include dialogue understanding using mental images; interfaces to CAD and multi-media systems, such as natural language querying of photographic databases; speech-driven design and assembly; machine translation systems; spatial queries for Geographic Information Systems; and systems which generate spatial descriptions on the basis of maps, cognitive maps, or other spatial representations, such as intelligent vehicle navigation systems. Though there have been many different approaches to the representation and processing of spatial expressions, most existing computational characterizations have so far been restricted to particularly narrow problem domains, usually specific spatial contexts determined by overall system goals. To date, artificial intelligence research in this field has rarely taken advantage of language and spatial cognition studies carried out by the cognitive science community. One of the fundamental aims of this book is to bring together research from both disciplines in the belief that artificial intelligence has much to gain from an appreciation of cognitive theories.