Three Kinds of Spatial Cognitionдругой
Аннотация: Abstract Spatial cognition is often (but wrongly) conceptualized as a single domain of cognition. However, humans function in more than one way in the spatial world. We navigate, as do all mobile animals, but we also manipulate objects using distinctive hands with opposable thumbs, unlike other species. In fact, an important characteristic of human adaptation is the ability to invent tools. Of course, another central asset is human symbolic ability, which includes the ability to spatialize thought in abstractions such as maps, graphs, and analogies. Thus, there are at least three kinds of spatial cognition with three separable functions. Navigation involves moving around the environment to find food and shelter, and to avoid danger. It draws on several interconnected neural subsystems that track movement and encode the location of external entities with respect to each other and the moving self (i.e., extrinsic coding), and it integrates these inputs to achieve best‐possible estimates. Human navigation is characterized by a great deal of individual variation. Tool use and invention involves the mental representation and transformation of the shapes of objects (i.e., intrinsic coding). It relies on substantially different neural subsystems than navigation. Like navigation, it shows marked individual differences, which are related to variations in learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Spatialization is an aspect of human symbolic skill that cuts across multiple cognitive domains and involves many kinds of spatial symbol systems, including language, metaphor, analogy, gesture, sketches, diagrams, graphs, maps, and mental images. These spatial symbol systems are vital to many kinds of learning, including in STEM. Future research on human spatial cognition needs to further delineate the origins, development, neural substrates, variability, and malleability of navigation, tool use, and abstract spatial thinking, as well as their interconnections to each other and to other cognitive skills.
Год издания: 2018
Авторы: Nora S. Newcombe
Ключевые слова: Spatial Cognition and Navigation, Child and Animal Learning Development, Categorization, perception, and language
Открытый доступ: closed
Страницы: 1–31