Abstract Culture and language can influence the generation and interpretation of spatial language, which would impact the quality of computational spatial language processing. This paper presents three human-subject experiments aimed at investigating these potential influences on the quantitative interpretations of five spatial prepositions. We show that for the languages (English and German) and cultures investigated (Europe and United States) neither language nor culture have a significant influence.

Abstract. This paper examined cultural impacts on absolute and relative location estimates of 12 Eastern China cities, based on questionnaires of each city’s latitude and distances between city pairs. Linear regression analysis of the latitude estimates revealed that estimated latitude of a city is significantly related to its actual latitude. MDS analysis of the distance estimates revealed the gap that divided Eastern China into two regions and cultural-related causation of the gap was explained in detail. In particular, the Chinese language and its impact on spatial cognition were addressed. Results were compared with North America comparison was made to conclude important features of spatial cognition in common: the categorical storage of spatial information and the absolute-relative location reasoning process.

One of the most consistent findings in the past 30 years of spatial cognition research is that mental representations of spatial information often have a categorical structure. Several converging lines of research provide evidence for the psychological reality of categorical representations of spatial information. For example, when asked whether Se-attle or Montreal is farther north, people typically respond that Montreal is, even though the opposite is true. People make this error because they respond as if all Canadian cit-ies are north of all U.S. cities, even though this categorical knowledge can lead to large errors (Friedman & Brown,

Spatial judgments are affected both by fine-grained and categorical knowledge. We investigated whether, and how, the two forms of knowledge are learned in real-world, navigable space as well as the time course of learning each type of knowledge. Participants were Northwestern University undergraduates who estimated the locations of buildings and other landmarks on campus. The Northwestern campus is roughly divided into three regions whose borders are not easy to discern either from a map or by navigation. Nevertheless, students often refer to these regions linguistically and use them when making housing decisions, choosing classes, etc. We found that knowledge of both the fine-grained configuration of locations and the regional distinctions increased with time. However, regional influences on judgments occurred later in students ’ time on campus. Consequently, computed distances across the nonexistent border between north and south campus locations became more biased with time. The results have implications for understanding how spatial representations develop in navigable environments.

There are several important reasons to study geographi-cal learning. First, knowledge of geographical or larger scale space is important for effective functioning in the modern world. Recent data show that American children and even adults have very little knowledge of world geog-raphy, leading to concern that the country is ill-equipped to consider important questions concerning international relations and an increasingly global economy (Liben & Downs, 1994). Second, studying geographical learning offers a real and complex context in which to examine the integration and the interaction of information from many disciplines and knowledge domains. Learning ge-ography requires more than simply encoding the spatial layout of cities and countries. It also involves learning the nature of the environments and climates in which these places are embedded, what natural resources these places possess, and the human aspects of such spatial contexts, such as cultures, political systems, and economic ac-tivities (National Geographic Research and Exploration, 1994). Third, in recent years, people working with geo-graphic information systems (GISs) have called for input from cognitive scientists, because understanding of how human minds process geographical information is vital to building and improving the application of GIS tech-