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 "reference frame"

frames of reference

To describe an object's position or orientation, one needs to specify it with respect to something else; that is, one needs to define location in a frame of reference. Levinson (1996) identified three kinds of frames of reference.... In a relative frame of reference, positions are specified in terms of directions relative to a viewer (e.g., the cat is to the left of the tree; the coarse-grained sediments are at the right end of the outcrop). Distance from a viewer is also a form of relative positional information (e.g., the cat is near to me; the earthquake is 152 km from the seismograph).

Earth Science

Kastens and Ishikawa (2006)

Spatial thinking in the geosciences and cognitive sciences: A cross-disciplinary look at the intersection of two fields

reference frame

Recognition of spatially based forms of membership (p. 91)

Geography

Golledge, et al. (2008)

Matching geospatial concepts with geographic educational needs

reference frame

Spatial perception and memory are relative,not absolute. The location of one object is coded relative to the location of a reference object, ideally a prominent object in the environment, and also relative to a reference frame, such as the walls and ceiling of a building, large features of the surroundings such as rivers, lakes, and mountains, or the cardinal directions, north, south, east, or west (p 12-13).

Psychology

Tversky (2005)

Functional Significance of Visuospatial Representations

reference frame

Coding an object's location with respect to an external frame of reference involves noting its spatial relations with other objects, usually so-called landmarks that constitute long-term stable reference systems for specific areas (p 14). Encoding the position of the moving self is an essential aspect of spatial orientation, but coding the position of objects relative to the moving self can also be the basis for spatial coding of objects, in addition to or instead of representations using external frames of reference (p 18-19).

Psychology

Newcombe and Huttenlocher (2000)

Making Space