Montello’s overview of research in spatial cognition highlights interesting paradoxes. Research on the subject has been quite extensive, yet the benefits of this research have so far been extremely limited. Yet the author advocates enhanced research on specific aspects of spatial cognition. In particular, research would be more useful if there was a greater emphasis on how to preserve human cognitive abilities while simultaneously achieving greater convenience in daily life through devices that are better suited to human cognition. I fear that this goal may be difficult to achieve when research is so industry-driven. Unfortunately the private sector probably has no incentive to prevent technological infantilization and would in fact have very strong incentives to encourage it. Another issue stressed by Montello which I found particularly interesting was that of how uncertainty metadata affects the decision-making process of users of geographic information. I wonder, however, what sorts of uncertainty metadata users are exposed to at all. GIS users with an academic background may be exposed to such metadata as standard error, but I can’t picture how uncertainty metadata could be presented to ordinary users of Google Maps, for example. I would guess that it would mostly be people from a particular educational and cultural background who think of uncertainty quantitatively. I suppose a good application of this research would be in the management of automobile traffic. Planners could provide uncertainty metadata about how bad traffic might be on certain route options, in order to bring about an optimal scenario of how many drivers opt for which route. They could thereby maximize the efficiency of the distribution of traffic. However, I think this would be greatly complicated by the diversity of conceptions of uncertainty between individuals and cultures.
– Yojo