Kevin Lyn The Image of the City remains one of the most important books in environmental design research. Its approach relies upon behavioral observations and systematic surveys of environmental cognition. We can perceive only what we see; thus, sight is the most important sense in landscape design. The spaces and objects of landscape design are stored temporally in the mind; they cannot be use...

Techniques for improving the imageability of an existing data visualisation are described. The aim is to make the visualisation more easily explored, navigated and remembered. Starting from a relatively sparse landscape– like representation of a set of objects, we selectively add to the visualisation static features such as clusters, and dynamic features such as view–specific sampling of object...

The aim of the present study was to provide Russian normative data for the Snodgrass and Vanderwart (Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 28, 516-536, 1980) colorized pictures (Rossion & Pourtois, Perception, 33, 217-236, 2004). The pictures were standardized on name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, imageability, and age of acquisition. Objective word frequenc...

Distinguishing between living (animate) and nonliving (inanimate) things is essential for survival and successful reproduction. Animacy is widely recognized as a foundational dimension, appearing early in development, but its role in remembering is currently unknown. We report two studies suggesting that animacy is a critical mnemonic dimension and is one of the most important item dimensions u...

Although much is known about the representation and processing of concrete concepts, our knowledge of what abstract semantics might be is severely limited. In this paper we first address the adequacy of the two dominant accounts (dual coding theory and the context availability model) put forward in order to explain representation and processing differences between concrete and abstract words. W...