Abstract:

This paper posits the usefulness of mental shifts of scale and perspective in thinking and communicating about spatial relations, and describes two experimental techniques for researching such cognitive activities. The first example involves mentally expanding a hand-sized piece of entangled string, a knot, so that following a portion of the string into a crossing resembles the act of walking along a path and over a bridge. The second example involves transforming experience and conceptions of the large-scale environment to small-scale representations through the act of mapmaking, and then translating the map to depictions of street-level views. When used in the context of clinical research methodologies, these techniques can help to elicit multimodal expressions of conceived topological relationships and geographical detail, with particular attention to individual differences.