Unit 2 Section 2: Environmental Cognition

Vocabulary flashcards covering the key terms, theoretical models, cognitive biases, and design principles of environmental and spatial cognition.

Environmental Cognition

The general term for how people think about environments.

Spatial Cognition

The way people acquire, store, organize, and recall information about locations, distances, and arrangements in buildings, streets, and the outdoors.

Wayfinding

The thinking processes that enable individuals to navigate through an environment, estimate distances, recognize routes, and read maps.

Cognitive Maps

The pictorial and semantic images stored in people's minds that relate to how places are arranged.

Optimal Level of Stimulation

A concept introduced by Joachim Wohlwill, based on Harry Helson's adaptation-level theory, proposing that satisfaction decreases when stimulation for an activity is either too high or too low relative to one's adapted level.

Restricted Environmental Stimulation Technique (REST)

An experimental procedure used by Peter Suedfeld and colleagues to examine the cognitive outcomes of drastically reduced stimulation, such as placing participants in a dark, silent chamber for 24 hours.

Legibility

The ease with which a physical setting can be recognized and organized by people, a concept established by Kevin Lynch in 'The Image of the City.'

Paths

One of Kevin Lynch's five elements of legibility; the routes along which people travel, typically including roads, walkways, and public transit routes.

Edges

One of Kevin Lynch's five elements of legibility; linear boundaries not primarily designed for travel, such as cliffs, escarpments, or shores.

Districts

One of Kevin Lynch's five elements of legibility; moderate-sized city areas identified by residents as possessing a particular character.

Nodes

One of Kevin Lynch's five elements of legibility; strategic, well-known points people travel to and from, typically located at the junctures of important paths like transit terminals or plazas.

Landmarks

One of Kevin Lynch's five elements of legibility; easily viewed reference elements on either a grand scale (such as a city's tallest building) or a smaller scale (such as a storefront or statue).

Social Legibility

The notion that the meaning of environmental elements differs across cultures, causing the exact same physical place to possess varying degrees of legibility for different groups of people.

Projective Stage

A developmental stage identified in Jean Piaget's framework where school-age children gain the ability to adopt viewpoints other than their own and orient themselves using prominent landmarks.

Euclidean Bias

A cognitive bias leading people to envision environments as more gridlike or Euclidean than they are, causing them to mentally straighten curves and perceive non-perpendicular intersections as right angles.

Superordinate-Scale Bias

A spatial bias in which individuals reason about the location of uncertain places by relying on the larger categories or groupings that contain them, occasionally resulting in spatial errors.

Segmentation Bias

A spatial-cognitive distortion where mentally dividing a route into separate segments alters distance evaluations, causing distance estimates within the same segment not to increase with objective distance.

Space Syntax

A method of analyzing architectural and urban spaces based on how the spatial and physical features affect movement through the environment.

Regionalization

The mental process of grouping locations together into distinct sets, such as rooms within a building or towns within a geographical region.

Hierarchical Organization

The cognitive structure of nesting categories within categories, such as arranging cities inside countries, to organize spatial information.

Road Climbing

The tendency for wayfinders to choose long, straight routes from their starting point even when the selected path is $50\text{ percent}$ longer than other available options.

Taxon System

A spatial cognition system in John O'Keefe and Lynn Nadel's brain model that directs the specific route taken using guidance hypotheses and orientation hypotheses.

Locale System

A spatial cognition system in John O'Keefe and Lynn Nadel's brain model that represents places and relies on place hypotheses constructed in the brain to organize spatial knowledge.

World Graph

A physiological model of spatial cognition where an individual's encountered situations and their relations are represented and encoded across neural nodes.

Structure-Matching

A design principle for you-are-here maps stating that the map should accurately mirror the layout, features, and recognizable labels of the setting it portrays.

Forward-Up Equivalence

An orientation principle for you-are-here maps specifying that the top of the map must correspond directly to the straight-ahead direction in the actual setting.