Cognitive Skill: Implications for Spatial Skill in Large-Scale Environments

摘要

The recent cognitive skills literature is reviewed and several principles of skilled performance are derived. One of the central issues in cognitive skills concerns the organization of knowledge and it was concluded that in a variety of domains, spatial knowledge is hierachically organized. This issue was explored in a map-drawing study and it was found that the most serious errors were due to a normalizing error, an error that is symptomatic of hierarchical organization. It was concluded that normalizing errors in large-scale environments are caused by incorrect representations at higher levels in the hierarchy (global errors). Finally, from an information processing analysis of spatial knowledge, the paper addresses the question of what are the cognitive processes underlying cognitive maps and cognitive mapping. (Author)