Structures of Mental Spaces

How People Think about Space Human activity takes place in space. Sometimes, interactions in space are explicit, as we grasp the things around us or find our ways inside and out. Other interactions are implicit, an awareness of where we are, where the things around us are. Still other spatial interactions are in imagination, when we estimate distances, or give directions, or describe a journey. To act effectively in space, humans need conceptions of space. We know about space and the things in it from looking, from hearing, from touching, from imagining, and from description. The knowledge obtained from these different sources is different; sometimes integrated and coherent, other times, not. The mental representations that we form of space from these real and imagined interactions differ from the external representations of spaces of geometry or of physics or of maps. For geometry, physics, and maps, space is basic, metric, uniform, and unitary, and things are located in it. In human conceptions of space, the things in space are basic, and the qualitative spatial relations among them form a scaffolding. Which things and which spatial relations depend on the space. We interact with many spaces, the space of the body in eating or dancing, the space around the body in basketball or soccer, the space of navigation in wayfinding or estmating distances. Each of these spaces is represented schematically, in terms of the elements and spatial relations important to it.