This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Spatial Cognition, Spatial Cognition 2008, held in Freiburg, Germany, in September 2008. The 27 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 54 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on spatial orientation, spatial navigation, spatial learning, maps and modalities, spatial communication, spatial language, similarity and abstraction, concepts and reference frames, as well as spatial modeling and spatial reasoning.

This important work brings together international academics from a variety of disciplines to explore the topic of spatial cognition on a 'geographic' scale. It provides an overview of the historical origins of the subject, a description of current debates and suggests directions for future research.

10.2 Summary of Ideas ..................................................... 256 10.2.1 Spatial Behavior As Rules For Decision Making ................................... 258 10.2.2. Cognitive Mapping ......................................................................... 258 10.2.3. Storing Information ................................................. " ...................... 260 10.2.4. Searching ..................................................................................... 260 10.2.5. Learning ........................................................................................ 261 10.2.6. Judging Similarity .......................................................................... 261 10.2.7 Neural Geographic Information Science (NGIS) .................................... 262 REFERENCES ............................................... 265 INDEX ........................ .............. 279 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................... 287 x LIST OF TABLES Table 8.1: The types of similarity comparisons created for the experiment to determine the effect ofx as a first or second common or distinctive feature (Lloyd, Rostkowska-Covington, and Steinke 1996). Table 9.1: Data used to compute the gravity model using regression and a neural network. Data for all variables are scaled so that the highest value equals 0.9 and the lowest value equals 0.1. Table 9.2: Class means for 11 socio-economic and life-cycle variables for the Black, Integrated, and White classes. Table 9.3: Weights for neuron at row 5 and column 1 that learned the blue horizontal rectangle map symbol. LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1: Spatial cognition is a research area of interest for both geography and psychology. Both disciplines are interested in fundamental ideas related to encoding processes, internal representations, and decoding processes. Figure 1.2: The place names on this map of New Orleans depict the propositions used for navigation by local residents. A similar map appeared in the June 30, 1991, edition of The Times-Picayune.

There are currently two major theories about the role of the hippocampus, a distinctive structure in the back of the temporal lobe. One says that it stores a cognitive map, the other that it is a key locus for the temporary storage of episodic memories. A. David Redish takes the approach that understanding the role of the hippocampus in space will make it possible to address its role in less easily quantifiable areas such as memory. Basing his investigation on the study of rodent navigation--one of the primary domains for understanding information processing in the brain--he places the hippocampus in its anatomical context as part of a greater functional system. Redish draws on the extensive experimental and theoretical work of the last 100 years to paint a coherent picture of rodent navigation. His presentation encompasses multiple levels of analysis, from single-unit recording results to behavioral tasks to computational modeling. From this foundation, he proposes a novel understanding of the role of the hippocampus in rodents that can shed light on the role of the hippocampus in primates, explaining data from primate studies and human neurology. The book will be of interest not only to neuroscientists and psychologists, but also to researchers in computer science, robotics, artificial intelligence, and artificial life.

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.

The metaphor of a "cognitive map" has attracted interest since the 1940s. Researchers from many fields have explored how humans process and use spatial information, why they make errors or not. This text brings together contributors from diverse fields to explore the