Cognitive and Linguistic Aspects of Geographic Space: An Introduction

This volume contains papers presented or discussed at a NATO Advanced Study Institute on “Cognitive and Linguistic Aspects of Geographic Space,” held in Las Navas del Marques, Spain, July 8–20,1990. We organized the meeting as a place to discuss people’s understanding of space, specifically geographic space. An important subsidiary goal was to try to understand how such cognitive concepts of space relate to Geographic Information Systems (GISs). We invited researchers from a wide spectrum of disciplines, from geography and linguistics, psychology and anthropology, to mathematics and engineering. Each of the disciplines deals with some aspect of understanding space. Each discipline, and indeed each individual, views the problem in a different way and from a unique vantage point. The papers collected in this volume represent much of the breadth of this spectrum. Any such a collection of papers is of course influenced by the limitations of the size of the meeting, the availability of participants, and their ability to contribute to the topic. Despite this, we believe that the papers in this volume present a valuable perspective on our current understanding, and open5 a host of research avenues.