Spatial Concept Perspectives

We have gathered ~300 excerpts from published works about fundamental spatial concept terms. These have been cross-referenced with the concept lexicon appearing on the left. Those terms were drawn from the U.S.National Science Education Standards (NSES 1996) for topic areas B - Physical Science, C - Life Science, D - Earth and Space Science, as well as from the 1994 U.S. Geography Teaching Standards for grades 9-12. Those standards can be browsed here.

spatial concept terms

disciplinary perspectives on "cognitive map"

cognitive map

[Cognitive maps are] the mental representations that we draw on to answer questions about directions and distances, to tell someone how to get from A to B, to make educated guesses about weather patterns, population migrations, and political spheres of influence, and to find our ways in the world (p 12). [They] appear to be fragmented, schematized, inconsistent, incomplete, and multimodal. This is an inevitable consequence of spatial knowledge acquired from different modalities, perspectives, and scales (p 12).

Psychology

Tversky (2005)

Functional Significance of Visuospatial Representations

mental model

Mental models are non-verbal recall-of-experience-like mental versions of situations that have structures isomorphic to the perceived structures of the situations they represent (p 861). Individuals reason by manipulating objects in mental models and observing the results (p 861). (So) the properties and behavior of the objects in a mental model simulate the properties and behavior we believe the objects they represent possess (p 861).

Mathematics

Battista (2007)

The Development of Geometric and Spatial Thinking

perspective

...two dominant perspectives people take on space, an external view, prototypically the view people have on objects that they observe and manipulate, and an internal view, prototypically the view people have on the environments they explore (p 9).

Psychology

Tversky (2005)

Functional Significance of Visuospatial Representations