As technology changes, so do our applications of spatial cognition. When reading this article, I first thought it was dated, as technology has replaced the need to imagine many spaces. Perhaps as a geography student I am biased, but for almost every small task I looked at travel times, Google maps transit extension for route planning, Streetview, and long hours on google earth which replaces the spatially iconic symbolic representation with a digital earth.
What I have learned from this article is that spatial cognition is not irrelevant in my technology-saturated life. A good example is how people perceive the distance of my apartment from campus. Technology tells us that I live 1.5 km west of campus whereas most of my friends live 1.5 km east of campus. Despite this similarity almost all these eastern friends have concluded at some point that I live “very far” from campus and getting there must be difficult. I propose there are several factors of spatial cognition that contribute to this spatial understanding as described in the article. Firstly these friends are not familiar with the area west of campus, so their wayfinding through experience abilities are limited. Navigating through the high-rises of the downtown core, you lose your common landmarks like McGill campus or Mont-Royal. The highrises block your view and therefore limit your spatial knowledge learned directly as well as inhibit your sense of orientation. I believe that these factors are why my friends have a limited ability to judge the distance of my apartment from campus. In terms of using spatial language, when explaining directions to my apartment from campus I say, “it’s just down from the Bell Centre.” I can justify this spatially vague language because most people have an understanding of how to get to the Bell center as it is a large landmark of the city. In addition, the ability for people to use smartphones if they get lost, means that my spatial language does not have to navigate people directly, only give them idea of distance base on their own acquired or imagined spatial knowledge.
-anontarian