cognitive mapping

cognitive map


for movement in space – thinking of movement from one point to another- you need special information, you got from exploration and experience. this information is saved in so called cognitive maps or imaginations… cognitive maps are mental pictures of the environment, structuring perception, reaction and movement through the environment.




the process of cognitive mapping is characterized by encoding and decoding of mental representation.




it is a:
interactive process: there is a continuous interaction with the environment, so there is a continuous development of the information of space


selective process: you choose from a plurality of information only the individual interesting and essential.


structuring process: the absorbed information has to be simplified, structured and reduced to get the signification of them.






4 steps to build spatial information:


1. landmark knowledge: mark significant points
2. route knowledge: the route between the landmarks
3. build cluster: reference of the landmarks
4. survey knowledge: you get a complex picture, relative objects, connections and distances




tool to analyse
1. micro-macro readings
2. layering and separation
3. colour and information
4. narratives of space and time

image – sign – relevance

Contrary to Foucault´s position concerning the radical distinction between the visible and the readable, the map is immediately both readable and visible. It functions like a non-mimetic image, an image-index (Pierce), that lies at the origin of a pragmatic of expression. A toponym, such as Paris or Berlin, is localized, and corresponds to a referential and contextual territory, a country, a fragment of a country or a planisphere.

 

From then on, the map became a mere artifact, and it is easy to understand the fascination it inspired in the first artist cartographers, Leonardo da Vinci or Dürer. The map seizes the real, masters it, and allows a glimpse of an unconscious quality of vision with its folding and unfoldings, within a weightless plane. A map takes possession of the limits and the borders of the unlimited.

This is why these new visibilities that are distinct from the perspectivist schema with its point of view, combine several heterogeneous elements. It is a “descriptio” connecting images and signs, a new kind of abstraction, that views the diagram as abstract, and that allows for the pluralism of the direction and the displacements characteristic to a world regard, projected onto a continuous or fragmented plane, with all its variations of scale.