Representational structures for cognitive space: Trees, ordered trees and semi-lattices

Abstract

During the past twenty years, numerous researchers and papers have discussed inclusion of a hierarchical component to the cognitive representation of spatial knowledge. However, such discussion has occurred without serious consideration of alternative representations. This paper examines the nature of hierarchical representation for spatial representations, in detail, and considers several alternative representational schemes, including ordered trees and semi-lattices. In addition, differences between these representations are demonstrated by mapping two sample datasets onto a variety of representations.