The Impact Of Cognitive Map Reading Tasks On The Ability To Navigate With A Map

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.

In this book, Cathleen Heil addresses the question of how to conceptually understand children’s spatial thought in the context of geometry education. She proposes that in order to help children develop their abilities to successfully grasp and manipulate the spatial relations they experience in their everyday lives, spatial thought should not only be addressed in written or tabletop settings at school. Instead, geometry education should also focus on settings involving real space, such as during reasoning with maps. In a first part of this book, she theoretically addresses the construct of spatial thought at different scales of space from a cognitive psychological point of view and shows that maps can be rich sources for spatial thinking. In a second part, she proposes how to measure children’s spatial thought in a paper-and-pencil setting and map-based setting in real space. In a third, empirical part, she examines the relations between children’s spatial thought in those two settings both at a manifest and latent level.

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.

This text provides a fascinating approach to the widely studied area of individual differences and in particular sex differences. The book looks at perception, attention, memory, language and other cognitive domains, with each chapter outlining the processes involved before explaining the relationship between each sex and cognitive performance.

This is a comprehensive, but accessible text that introduces students to the fields of human factors and ergonomics. The book is intended for undergraduate students, written from the psychological science perspective along with various pedagogical components that will enhance student comprehension and learning. This book is ideal for those introductory courses that wish to introduce students to the multifaceted areas of human factors and ergonomics along with practical knowledge the students can apply in their own lives.

Though traditionally designed for entertainment, video games are being used more and more by psychologists to understand topics such as skill acquisition, cognitive capacity and plasticity, aging, individual differences, and development. The appeal of using video games over simpler laboratory paradigms partly comes from their ability to present rich and complex cognitive challenges more representative of the demands of the complex everyday tasks we perform outside of the laboratory. However, this complexity also presents a host of methodological and analytic challenges. This Research Topic brings together research using games to explore cognitive processes, with a special focus on the challenges of this approach. Challenges are in terms of design, implementation, or data analysis.