Gordon Legge
Department of Psychology
University of Minnesota
Maplets: Speculations on the Structure of Cognitive Maps
The cognitive representation underlying human spatial navigation is often
dichotomized into "route knowledge" and "survey knowledge." I will critique
this traditional view. Motivated by concepts from studies of animal
navigation, I will propose a different form of underlying representation
for human navigation. "Maplets" are small pieces of maps whose configural
information can be encoded from a single location using vision. I will
discuss the maplet representation of building layouts, and an algorithm for
combining maplets into a global cognitive map.