Thinking about space is thinking about spatial things. The table is on the carpet; hence the carpet is under the table. The vase is in the box; hence the box is not in the vase. But what does it mean for an object to be somewhere? How are objects tied to the space they occupy? In this book Roberto Casati and Achille C. Varzi address some of the fundamental issues in the philosophy of spatial representation. Their starting point is an analysis of the interplay betwen mereology (the study of part/whole relations), topology (the study of spatial continuity and comapctness) and the theory of spatial location proper. This leads to a unified framework for spatial representation understood quite broadly as a theory of the representation of spatial entities. The framework is then tested against some classical metaphysical questions such as: Are parts essential to their whole? Is spatial co-location a sufficient criterion of identity? What (if anything) distinguishes material objects from events and other spatial entities? The concluding chapters deal with applications to topics as diverse as the logical analysis of movement and the semantics of maps.

Despite our impression of a seamless spatial world, mature human spatial knowledge is composed of sub-systems, each specialized. This book uses the case of Williams syndrome — a rare genetic deficit - to argue for specialization of function in both normal and unusual development. The evidence suggests a speculative hypothesis linking the genetic deficit to changes in the timing of emergence for different sub-systems. More broadly, the book shows the complexity of spatial cognition, its genetic correlates, and realization in the brain.

Argues for an interactionist approach to spatial development that incorporates and integrates essential insights of the Piaget, Nativist, and Vygotskyan approaches.

With the widespread use of GIS, multi-scale representation has become an important issue in the realm of spatial data handling. However, no book to date has systematically tackled the different aspects of this discipline. Emphasizing map generalization, Algorithmic Foundation of Multi-Scale Spatial Representation addresses the mathematical basis of

Spatial Representation presents original, specially written essays by leading psychologists and philosophers on a fascinating set of topics at the intersection of these two disciplines. The essays are arranged into five sections, each of which reflects a central area of research into spatial cognition, and opens with a short introduction by the editors, designed to facilitate cross-disciplinary reading.

How do we find our way? The discovery of medial entorhinal cortex grid cells in 2005 stimulated a wide variety of experimental, theoretical and computational work aimed at elucidating the neural circuit underlying spatial representations in the entorhinal cortex. However, grid cells act in concert with place cells, head direction cells and border cells, each playing a part in the spatial navigation circuit. The aim of this Research Topics is to solicit contributions from leading researchers in the field of spatial navigation and spatial memory to present new experimental data, computational modeling or discussion on mechanisms underlying the neural encoding of space in the parahippocampal cortices.

In recent years the development of spatial referencing techniques in com puter-based information systems has enormously increased the opportuni ties that exist for the treatment and presentation of both point and interaction data. The extent of this increase has drawn attention to the need for special aggregation and clustering procedures to be developed which enable data to be grouped in an efficient way for analytical pur poses with a minimum loss of detail. In the case of interaction data, economy of representation is particularly important as the analysis is further complicated by the two-way directionality that is inherent in each data set. Procedural rules of this kind are needed not only for descriptive analy sis and spatial accounting but also for hypothesis testing and the develop ment of operational models of spatial interaction. Yet the importance of spatial representation in this kind of research has only recently been fully understood. The first generation of urban development models that were developed in Europe and North America during the 1960's often treated matters of zoning system specification very casually, even though in some cases this imposed severe limits on the interpretation of their findings and it was not until the Centre for Environmental Studies/Cheshire project (Barras et al. , 1971) that a serious attempt was made to put forward general principles which could be used as guidelines in future work.