From compasses and maps to mountains and territories: Experimental results on geographic cognitive categorization

Abstract

The present study is part of the general effort to explore commonsense conceptualizations of the geospatial domain in order to deal with the massive access and use of geographic information by different groups of people. The chapter focuses on the perception and cognitive categorization of geographic entities. A basic working assumption is that although the surrounding geographic world has a real structure, there are differences in the way this structure is perceived and conceptualized by different individuals. The present study builds upon a series of experiments in order to provide a comparative investigation of the influence of two factors on geographic categorization: (a) language and (b) expertise.