IMAGES AND MENTAL MAPS
YI-FU TUAN
ABSTRACT. "Image" and "mental map" appear frequently in the literature of
environmental perception, often in an abstract or metaphorical sense. As psychological
phenomena mental images do not play any essential role in spatial behavior,
nor in abstract thinking. To account for spatial ability we need to postulate "schemata,"
rather than images and mental maps. The mental map, a special kind of
image, does have its functions: for example, it is a mnemonic device; it allows mental
practice which promotes assurance in subsequent physical performance; it is,
like the real map, a way to organize data; it is an imaginary world, complex and
attractive enough to tempt people out of their habitual rounds. To generate images
focal attention seems necessary. In an inattentive state, skillful behavior in space
is still possible under the guidance of somatic intelligence or schemata, KEY WORDS:
Attention, Imagery, Imagination-image, Memory, Mental maps. Percept, Schemata,
Spatial behavior.
IN the last fifteen years geographers have
shown increasing interest in mental phenomena.^
Perhaps no branch of human geography
is now wholly innocent of what might be
called a psychological perspective. With the
new interest comes a new vocabulary. In geographical
writing as in the literature of planning,
architecture, and urban sociology, words such
as perception, image, cognitive structure, perceptual
space, schema, and mental maps occur
with mounting frequency. What do these words
mean? They are not neologisms. They look
familiar, and perhaps for this reason writers
who are not professional philosophers or psychologists
tend to use them without earnest effort
to clarify the words' meaning and importance.
Image, for example, is an artificial
likeness or picture of an object; it is also a
percept sustained by current sensory input, a
mental picture in the memory, and furthermore
it could also mean a people's schematic and indirect
knowledge of place, as in the expression
"the European's image of the New World."
Mental map may be the street plan a person
recalls as he gives directions to a friend, or it
could be the geographer's cartographic representation
of people's attitudes toward places.^
Accepted for publication 6 January 1975.
Dr. Tuan is Professor of Geography at the University
of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN 55455.
1 In the early days of psychology the mind occupied
the center of the stage and mental imagery was one of
the most important concepts for understanding human
behavior. With the growth of behaviorism in the
1920s, mental imagery began to fade as a serious subject
for investigation in the English-speaking world.
Behaviorists recognized only behavior: mental phenomena
were simply identified with behavior. Since
the 1960s imagery once more became a serious subject
of study for scientific psychologists. Geographers
are in an ambivalent position between these two psychological
developments. Though geographers profess
an interest in the mind their focus of study remains
observable behavior. The mind appears as a sort of
"ghost in the machine" that makes it easier to understand
certain kinds of human action.
2 It is not my purpose to review the extensive literature
on environmental perception in order to show
how key mental terms like image and mental map
are used. Such a review would be a worthwhile and
ambitious undertaking in its own right. By and large
historical geographers use the term image in the same
sense as historians, that is, as a people's concept of a
place or region which they have not directly experienced
and which can be expressed in words, pictures,
or maps. Thus J. M. Powell, a geographer, spoke of
"the nineteenth century protean images of Australia,"
and Howard Mumford Jones, a literary historian,
spoke of the "image" and "anti-image" of the New
World. Urban geographers, following Kevin Lynch
(architect and planner), use image in the narrower
sense of how people restructure in words and sketches
the visual images of places that they have directly
experience. Psychologists talk of image as a special
kind of event that occurs briefiy in an individual's
mind.
The idea of mental or cognitive map was introduced
by the psychologist E. C. Tolman to account for the
fact that rats, and presumably also men, respond not
ANNALS OF THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN GEOGRAPHERS Vol. 65, No. 2, June 1975
© 1975 by the Association of American Geographers. Printed in U.S.A.
205
206 Yi-Fu TuAN June
Words like image and mental map are loosely
and variously defined. Have they become poetic
metaphors kept in use out of habit, or do they
in fact capture important facets of human geographical
behavior? The purpose of this paper
is to show that mental events are elusive but not
ineffable, that they justify a rather special vocabulary,
and that their study contributes fundamentally
to the understanding of human activities
in space. The approach is descriptive:
mental phenomena are made more "tangible"
by relating them to real life situations.
SCHEMATA
Interest in the mind rests largely on the belief
that human actions, from finding one's way
around town to discovering the New World, are
guided by mental images and maps. Is this true,
and if true, what is the specific nature of such
imagery? It is assumed that complicated movements
are guided by rational decisions and
plans carried in the head. An assumption of
this kind can easily lead to wrong inferences
concerning the nature of the mental world.
Elaborate actions taken by animals, including
human beings, do not necessarily require "pictures"
and "maps" in the head.^ Take the exonly
to specific and successive stimuli in the environment,
but to entire environmental fields. An animal
appears capable of elaborating a "cognitive-like map"
of the field and acting in it accordingly. Under the influence
of Peter Gould and Thomas Saarinen, among
others, geographers tend to see mental maps primarily
as 1) cartographic representations of how people
differ in their evaluation of places, and 2) freehand
maps that people can draw—outlines of city streets
and continents,
J. M. Powell, "Medical Promotion and the Consumptive
Immigrant to Australia," Geographical Review,
Vol, 63 (1973), p, 449; Howard Mumford
Jones, "The Image of the New World" and "The
Anti-Image," in O Strange New World (New York:
The Viking Press, 1964), pp, 1-70; Kevin Lynch, The
Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960); E,
C, Tolman, "Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men,"
Psychological Review, Vol, 55 (1948), pp, 189-208;
Peter Gould and Rodney White, Mental Maps (Harmondsworth:
Pelican Books, 1974); Thomas F, Saarinen,
"The Use of Projective Techniques in Geographical
Research," in William H, Ittelson, ed,.
Environment and Cognition (New York: Academic
Press, 1973), pp. 29-52, For the many, though by no
means all, senses of the terms images and mental map,
see Roger M, Downs and David Stea, eds,. Image and
Environment (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company,
1973).
3 In current academic thinking, "liberals" seek to
deny basic distinctions between animals and people.
ample of small-brained animals which are capable
of long-distance migration. The American
golden plover swings from Arctic breeding
grounds to the southeastern coast of South
America and back. Its spatial ability is most impressive,
yet it is unrealistic to suppose that the
bird navigates its intercontinental course
through consultation with intricate celestial and
terrestrial charts in its head. Birds may not even
have images as humans know them, much less
mental maps. Their ability to traverse vast distances
under different conditions of light and sky
requires detailed explanation, which we do not
yet possess. It seems unlikely, however, that
the visual image, something like a picture, will
be a component of any sophisticated explanation.*
What needs to be understood is the animal's
schemata (cognitive structures or coding
systems) that enable it to respond appropriately
to shifting patterns of environmental stimuli.
The usefulness of the terms "schema" or "cognitive
structure" lies in that they do not suggest
"picture," whether material or mental.
whereas "conservatives" believe that the distinctions,
based on man's high symbolic capacity, are important
and should not be overlooked. Is animal territoriality
essentially the same as human territoriality? Are animal
systems of communication essentially the same
as human language? Ethologists and behaviorists look
hard for similarities, whereas humanists and linguists
of the Chomsky school are primarily concerned with
the differences. This debate is probably perennial, and
it should certainly be encouraged,
* Susanne K. Langer criticizes the widespread tendency
for anthropomorphic interpretation of animal
migration and spatial behavior in Mind: An Essay on
Human Feeling (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1972), Vol, II, pp, 45-101, She notes
(p. 90): "All explanations of animal pathfinding as
navigation by celestial cues impute excessively high
mental operations to birds, bats, cetaceans., , and fish.
Yet the amazing acts are patently observable, and
typically are carried through without much hesitation,
trial and error, or apparent misinterpretation of signals.
Clearly there is something more than a use of
zodiac signs and sun readings involved in the original
orientation of migrating birds. Perhaps our search for
the basic navigation compass in their external world
is a vain effort, because neither birds nor beasts steer
their essential courses by any compasslike means." It
is at least clear that familiar landmarks play very little
role in how pigeons find their way home, in striking
contrast to human beings who depend on familiar
landmarks and whose maps are systems of landmarks.
When frosted contact lenses are put over the eyes of
pigeons, they can still find their way home. See William
T. Keeton, "The Mystery of Pigeon Homing,"
Scientific American, Vol. 231 (1974), p, 105.
1975 IMAGES AND MENTAL MAPS 207
Human beings have large brains. Our acts
are rational, by which we mean that they follow
mental or material plans. Intelligent action
seems to require specific awareness, yet it is
well known that not only complicated movements
can be carried out without plan or
image but that the intervention of imagery may
well hinder performance. A beginning typist
needs a plan of the keys, an experienced typist
doesn't. His fingers fly over the keyboard.
While typing he is totally unaware of the position
of the keys. After typing he may be hard
put to express verbally or through writing where
the alphabets are located on the keyboard. He
has to make a special mental effort to tell or
depict something that his fingers can do effort-
lessly.
Consider the kinds of movement that interest
geographers, those that involve changes of location
at different scales. Begin with the young
child who has learned to walk. He is soon able
to totter about the room or in the backyard,
not randomly, but from a starting point to a
destination and then back. According to Jean
Piaget, a mathematician might look at the
moves objectively, that is, from an external
viewpoint, and characterize the motor series as
a group of displacements or as reversibility:
the young child can be said to have learned to
coordinate his displacement in a whole system
which allows him to return to the point of departure.
Does this mean that the child's tour is
guided by an image or a plan that he can represent
for himself? Piaget's answer is "not at
all." Even children four and five years old, who
can go from home to school and return alone,
appear unable to represent their path of travel;
they are not conscious of having and following
a plan. Insofar as they are able to represent the
path to school it is a kind of motor representation.
A five-year-old child might say: "I leave
the house, I go like that (gesture), then like
that (gesture), then I make a turning like that,
then I reach school."^
5 Jean Piaget, The Child and Reality (New York:
Viking Compass Edition, 1974), pp. 18-19. In book
after book Piaget argues that young children have a
high degree of what he calls "sensorimotor intelligence,"
but denies that they are able to conceptualize
their acts. He also denies "mental images" and "ideational
behavior" to animals. "It is very hard to conceive
of any representation because the animal has no
semiotic instruments (language or the like), and to
call up 'mental images' presupposes a capacity for
Adults, in the course of a day, make many
highly complex yet undeliberated movements.
Perhaps the most dramatic examples come from
motoring. Many long-distance drivers and commuters
have known the experience of "blanking
out" while they are on a monotonous and
familiar stretch of the road: their bodies take
over the driving, responding to curves and even
to traffic signals correctly, while their minds
are empty or occupied with other things. Griffith
Williams has collected cases of what he calls
"highway hypnosis." Hypnosis can be variously
induced, as, for example, by the gentle curves
of the highway, the muffled purr of a smoothly
running engine, the hum of the tires, the glare
from the hood during daytime and from the
road, lit up by headlights, at night. One driver
describes his experience as follows:"
I discovered this fact (amnesia) while driving at
night from Portland, Oregon to San Francisco,
California. The lights of a town approached and I
realized that I had been in an almost sleep condition
for about 25 miles. Inasmuch as I knew the road I
had traveled was not straight, it was apparent that I
had negotiated the road, making all the turns, etc.
I did not remember the stretch of road at all . . . I
purposely tried it several times after that and found
that I could drive miles and miles without memory
of it, and while resting. In each case, the moment
any driving emergency appeared, I became fully
awake.
It is a common tendency to infer the presence
of deliberate thought and of articulated
mental images when we see complex behavior.
One feels that migrating birds must somehow
carry celestial charts in their heads which they
interpret with the skill of an astronomer, and
territorial animals have mental maps of their
evocation which is not only impossible to verify but
is, moreover, superfluous, since there is, in this case,
perception of that total field: the rat does not have
to imagine the objects or events which are not perceptible
at the time. All it has to do is to combine its
motions and perceptions in assessing the indices more
closely each time. It does not have to form a total
picture as a draftsman or cartographer does. There
is, of course, an overall system, but this is within the
action schemata and not in representation." Jean
Piaget, Biology and Knowledge (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 263-64.
^ Griffith Williams, "Highway Hypnosis: An Hypothesis,"
The International Journal of 'Clinical and
Experimental Hypnosis, Vol. 11 (1963), p. 147. For
a novelist's description of highway competence despite
absentmindedness, see Christopher Isherwood,
A Single Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964),
pp. 35-36.
208 Yi-Fu TUAN June
area comparable to the maps that a geographer
draws. Such beliefs are unproven. They are
not likely to be true. Reflection on our own
experience shows that deliberate thought of the
kind we use when we play chess or plan a family
trip is seldom employed in routinized circulations.
Such movements are not controlled by
any image or plan that can be represented in
words, diagrams, or gestures; they manifest
rather somatic intelligence.'^ The body is capable
of responding to changes in environmental
stimuli and adapting to them successfully in
accordance with its own schemata. The nature
of the schemata is little known, except that
they are partly innate and partly the result of
cumulative experience. Unlike the image, schemata
and cognitive structures cannot be directly
experienced: they can only be inferred.
The schemata of the lower animals appear
to be largely innate. Their impressive motor
skills are out of line with their modest capacity
to learn, that is, benefit step by step from interactions
with the environment. With human beings
experience and learning clearly play a
major role in building up the schemata. If people
can type with great speed and drive a car
over winding roads for many miles without
thinking, it is nonetheless obvious that these
motor skills have to be acquired first step by
step. The aspiring typist must make a conscious
effort to memorize the plan of the keyboard,
and the novice driver has to be taught by a verbalizing,
gesticulating teacher, or learn himself
through the careful study of a manual containing
diagrams and plans. Even the amoeba can
learn. Human beings under hypnosis can initiate
minor adaptive acts. Sustained innovative
behavior, however, requires the cooperation of
the deliberating mind. How important, then,
are images and mental maps to thinking? What
is the function of imagery in adaptive and innovative
spatial behavior?
IMAGERY
A percept is sustained by the information in
the environment: we see what is before us. An
image, on the other hand, is something we see
when the environmental stimuli do not appear
to justify it. I may recall my comfortable bed at
home when I am actually at a crowded party.
When percept and image are examined closely,
however, they can be shown to differ in degree
rather than in kind. A percept, after all, is not
a "snapshot" registering mechanically environmental
information; the eye is highly selective
of the stimuli to which it will respond. A memory-image,
on the other hand, may be prompted
by a current stimulus: cold air from the kitchen
ice box can call forth an image of snowbound
Minneapolis.^ Ability to see is obviously important
to human understanding, but what cognitive
functions do visual images serve?
When people think, images may or may not
arise in the mind. Images do appear involuntarily
in dreaming and daydreaming. People can
also deliberately summon scenes from the past.
Sometimes such memory-images are so vivid
that they are like pictures projected on a screen
to which one can turn to examine the details.
These are known as eidetic images. They decline
in sharpness and frequency with age and
verbal education. They appear to help children
to affix the "concrete" sensory aspects of the
environment in their minds; pseudo-sensory
images give children time to appraise their surrounding
world in their own way.^ With adults
the role of imagery in thinking and learning is
less clear. Some people claim dependency on
images when they think, others on words. Scientists
may be visualizers or verbalizers; some
make use of both images and words when they
cogitate, and a few claim to use neither. One
•^ "Somatic intelligence," "animal intelligence," and
"sensodmotor intelligence" are not metaphorical misuses
of the word intelligence, which means a capacity
for logical thought. H. H. Price argues that logical
notions such as not, or, and if exist in preverbal thinking
and in bodily movements that are enacted thoughts;
H. H. Price, Thinking and Experience (London:
Hutchinson University Library, 1969), pp. 123-43.
8 "The commonsense distinction between mental
image and percept is important and must be preserved.
Nevertheless, we should not lose sight of the fact that
the image that is usually called a percept is as much
a construct of the nervous system as is a memory
image . . . All images are the end product of a process
of construction, and that the usual dichotomy of percept
vs. mental image should be replaced by a continuum
on which these opposed notions are ideal cases
farely if ever attained in reality." Robert R. Holt, "On
the Nature and Generality of Mental Imagery," in
Peter W. Sheehan, ed.. The Function and Nature of
Imagery (New York: Academic Press, 1972), p. 12.
9 Gordon Allport, "Eidetic Imagery," British Journal
of Psychology, Vol. 15 (1924), pp. 99-110; Leonard
W. Doob, "The Ubiquitous Appearance of Images,"
in Sheehan, op. cit., footnote 8, pp. 319-20;
and Mardi J. Horowitz, "Visual Imagery and Cognitive
Organization," American Journal of Psychiatry,
Vol. 123 (1967), p. 945.
1975 IMAGES AND MENTAL MAPS 209
study of scientists shows that anthropologists
and psychologists tend to be verbalizers,
whereas biologists and physicists tend to be
visualizers.^" Geographers were not included
in the study. With their liking for pictures and
maps, they are perhaps good visualizers.
The decline of imagery with age and with increasing
verbal prowess suggests that images
are a luxury in thinking, somewhat like illustrations
in a book or slides in a lecture. Purely
logical processes are not imageable, although
the ability to envisage complex figures may help
one to sustain a high level of thought. Mathematicians,
for example, doodle. The weird lines
and cones they draw may be suggestive models
or symbols of N-dimensional space, but they
cannot be its image. Napoleon has a low opinion
of the intellectual role of imagery. He is reported
to have said that those who form a picture
of everything are unfit to command. F. C.
Bartlett, interpreting this remark, said: "A commander
who approaches a battle with a picture
before him of how such and such a fight went
on such and such an occasion, will find, two
minutes after the forces have joined, that something
has gone awry. Then his picture is destroyed.
He has nothing in reserve except another
individual picture."^^
If imagery has only a supportive or marginal
role in the more demanding kinds of thinking,
what is its function in life's routine cognitive efforts?
A geographer, for example, might ask:
do mental or memory images help people to
find their way about town? The answer would
seem to be a clear-cut yes until we pause to
examine what mental images are. An image is
a percept of the past. Suppose you are in a
city you have visited before, but in which you
feel lost. Clearly it serves no purpose to close
your eyes and summon images as memory aid.
If what you now see, the percept, provides inadequate
clues to orientation, then the past percept
(image) can only be even less adequate,
for the percept already contains memory traces
of the past in addition to current information
from the environment. Moreover, the images
that can be recalled may bear little relation to
your present difficulty, for the occasions that
caused particular scenes in the continuous
stream of past experience to be stored in your
mind may not be relevant to your present dilemma.
When you are lost you need a real
map and the help of street names. Recalling
odd images of shop windows, street corners,
and statues are no help. Would they help if
they can be spatially organized into mental
maps?
MENTAL MAPS
A mental map is a special type of image
which is even less directly related to sensory
experience. An image which is a mental map
rather than a "picture" is obviously a construct.
In fact, no percept or image is a mere photograph
of reality. A percept is not only the registering
of current environmental stimuli but also
an imaginative effort produced under the needs
of the moment. To see is to create. An image
is doubly a construct: it originates as a percept,
and then suffers further transformation under
the pressure of the occasion that prompts its
recall. A mental map may be the image of a
real map, that is, an abstraction of a real map
which is itself an abstraction of reality. Maps
can of course be created in the mind without
recourse to pen and paper. The discrete images
of a city—for example, scenes of shops, monuments,
and street corners—can be restructured
mentally into a plan. What is the use of such
an image-plan? If we are in a familiar world
and are merely going home in a routine way,
no mental map (in the sense of an image-plan)
is required: our clever moves through the scene
need only the guidance of unfocused perceptual
cues and imageless schemata. If, on the other
hand, we are lost mental maps may help to the
extent that they provide something to think
with; they make it easier to focus and reorganize
our thoughts. They cannot, however, be read off
in the way that a real map can. If they are so
clear that we can count the streets on them,
then we are not lost and have no cause to appeal
to memory images: percepts, themselves
partial products of memory, suffice.^^ Mental
10 Anne Rose, "A Study of Imagery in Research
Scientists," Journal of Personality, Vol. 19 (1951),
pp. 459-70.
11 F. C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental
and Social Psychology (Cambridge at the
University Press, 1932), p. 220.
12 Counting is not normally possible in memory
images, even when they seem very vivid. Most sensory
perceptions are in fact rather sketchy even when they
seem sharp and full of countable detail. "When I
look at the corrugated iron roof I am aware that I am
seeing 'stripes', but I am certainly not aware of the
number of these. To ascertain their number I must
210 Yi-Fu TUAN June
maps, then, are not representable images that
people carry in their heads as they go about
their business, nor are they of real use when we
are lost. Mental maps have other functions in
geographical knowledge and behavior. Here
are five examples.
1) Mental maps make it possible to give
directions to a stranger. There are two ways of
being helpful: one is to go with him, and the
other is to tell him how to get there. We can
tell him through speech, sketches, and gesticulation;
but before we can tell we must summon an
image of the route our enquirer has to take.
We pause and then say, "Ah, yes. You go to the
third traffic light, turn right and you will see a
church at the end of the road; turn left at the
church, go another two blocks and you will see
the restaurant on your right." None of the
features mentioned may be visible from where
we and the enquirer stand. We call up a mental
map which is then passed on to the enquirer.
Unless the communication succeeds and the
enquirer has a similar map in mind he will
not know the way and will have to ask for directions
again at the traffic light. Mental maps
prepare us to communicate spatial information
effectively.
2) Mental maps make it possible to rehearse
spatial behavior in the mind so that when we
are actually on the road we can act with a degree
of assurance that we would not otherwise
have. Such a mental exercise is not necessary
when we move in a routine fashion in thoroughly
familiar territory. It cannot be done
when we do not know the way, for then we need
to study a real map. Only when we think we
know the way but are not absolutely sure, do
we consult our mental map for the purpose of
making mental trial runs. Modern man is footloose;
he often has to go to places that are
slightly known. These may be the most common
occasions when mental maps emerge, because
they serve a definite function. They
allow mental practice, that is, the symbolic
rehearsal of a physical activity. In driving, as
in athletics, mental practice can improve physical
performance.^^
move my eyes along the roof, inspecting the 'stripes'
one by one. And this is precisely what I can never
do with my memory-image of corrugated roof." Brian
Smith, Memory (London: George Allen & Unwin,
1966), p. 161.
13 With regard to athletics, Alan Richardson says:
"When a high jumper is waiting for his turn to jump
3) Mental maps are a mnemonic device. If
we wish to memorize events, people, and
things, it helps to know their locations or even
to assign them to arbitrary locations. Suppose
we want to retain in our memory the people
who attended a party. One technique is to
identify the individual guests with their places
around the dining-room table. At a later date
when the need to remember the partygoers
arises, it is only necessary to reproduce the
mental map of their sitting positions. This spatial
mnemonic device, demonstrable in psychological
experiments, has been known since Roman
times. Orators found it useful because they
often had to make long, fact-laden speeches.
In De Oratore Cicero noted "that persons desiring
to train this faculty (of memory) must
select places and form mental images of the
things they wish to remember and store those
images in the places, so that the order of the
places will preserve the order of the things, and
the images of the things will denote the things
themselves, and we shall employ the places
and images respectively as a wax writing-tablet
and the letters written in it."^*
4) Mental maps, like real maps, are a means
to structure and store knowledge. Just as not
everyone is enamored of the real map and of
the kinds of information it is best suited to contain,
so not everyone has his mental wares arranged
in mental maps. Presumably geographers
have the greatest tendency to do so; yet
the fullest verbal transcription of a mental map
is that of an English novelist, Angus Wilson.
The transcription is worth quoting at length
because it says in some detail what imaging
and images are like, how they develop, and
under what condition they occur. Such accounts
are very rare in social science literature despite
the mounting interest in images and mental
maps 16
and in imagination 'sees' and 'feels' himself going
through the run up, take off, roll over and landing he
is engaged in mental practice . . . Improved performance
can result from this form of practice and that
visual and kinaesthetic imaging abilities may well play
a significant role in the amount of gain obtained by
any particular individual." Alan Richardson, Mental
Imagery (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969),
p. 56.
1* Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 22; and
G. H. Bower, "Analysis of a Mnemonic Device,"
American Scientist, Vol. 58 (1970), pp. 496-510.
15 Angus Wilson, The Wild Garden (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1963), pp. 119-20.
1975 IMAGES AND MENTAL MAPS 211
I failed to learn my mathematics, but the order and
pattern that I might have achieved from them were
built deep into my preferred subjects of geography
and history. If I remember at some moment a
particular object that I have seen, say the Blue
Mosque in Istanbul, then the natural tendency of
my mind, if unchecked . . . , is to place this building
in relation to other famous Istanbul mosques
that I have seen, and these in turn I see visually on
what I remember from the whole map of Istanbul
in my Blue Guide. If I am tired and idle the picture
will begin automatically to expand. Istanbul will
appear on a map of Turkey beside the other Turkish
towns I have visited, which will in their turn acquire
visual details. This map will also be marked with
the towns I failed to see, in feebler pictures of details
that I have only read of. . . . On the edges of
my consciousness, waiting to slide into vision . . . is
a whole world map, appearing something like those,
demographic charts in which densely populated
areas are heavily studded with black dots, Antarctica
largely a blank. My map, however, has black
dots of real experience and grey dots of imagination
and, in between, varying shades to mark literary
associations, historic events, the home of towns of
people whom I have met when they were travelling
abroad, and so on. Thus on my mental map the
London area is a black splodge, Provence richly
black, Antarctica (the scene of many of my ice
fears) a heavy grey, Tehran lightly marked by my
view of the airport in the early morning hours,
overshaded because it is the residence of an old
friend, cross-shaded by the word Mussadig and his
pyjamaed form . . . Above this world map with its
overlays or shadings and collections of dramatis
personae, time spirals upwards so that each place
too has its historical chart either dating personal
experiences or bringing into mind its historic past.
5) Mental maps are imaginary worlds. They
depict attractive goals that tempt people out of
their habitual rounds. A mental map that is also
an imaginary world has interest for historians
and historical geographers because it helps to
explain why people migrate. Goal-directed migration
is characteristically human. True, animal
movements in space can be described in
the human terms of home, journey, goals. Animal
goals, however, are more appropriately
called "stations," pauses necessitated by biological
needs, along routes that are essentially
round trips. Human cyclical movement may
also be of this kind. We leave home everyday
to go to the office and on the way home we
stop by the newsstand to pick up the evening
paper. These trips can become so routine that
we no longer think of office and newsstand as
goals: they are stations in a round trip that begins
and ends at home.
Quintessential human migration occurs when
people deliberately abandon one home in favor
of a distant and unseen goal. In the nineteenth
century many Europeans left their homes for
remote parts of the world of which they had
no direct experience. They did not go blindly:
the move was a calculated risk. They had images
of their new homes based on hearsay, letters
from relatives, and immigration literature.
Indeed these attractive images were a cause of
their desire to move.
Scottish farmers, while they toiled on the
edges of the moors, could nevertheless envision
sunny California. Such elaborated mental maps
of unseen places are conceivable only in human
beings. They depend on the ability to create
images rather than on the ability to recall them.
Memory-image can be distinguished from
imagination-image. The latter is more arbitrary,
often lacking firmness and context. A memoryimage
might show a friend riding a bicycle down
a narrow path. As one continues to entertain
the image its frame expands naturally and involuntarily
to include the broader context of
trees along the path and of fields beyond the
trees. With imagination-image the components
are put together deliberately and fancifully, that
is, arbitrarily; for example, the friend may be
perceived to ride an elephant rather than a
bicycle. The friend is a memory-image and so
is the elephant, but the two have never been
seen together: the image is a creative construction,
more or less arbitrary, and because of the
arbitrariness it does not expand naturally into
a broader context.^*' An imaginary world is an
elaborated imagination-image. A Scottish
farmer constructs California, his imaginary
world, out of bits of his experience in the
warmer parts of Scotland and from what he has
read. The process of construction is not well
understood. It is the fundamental problem in
perception. Even the percept is not simply a
registration of current stimuli. Imaginative construction
affects all aspects of human awareness,
and memory plays a role in all imaginative
constructions. If it is puzzling that a Scottish
farmer in his croft can envision sunny California,
it is no less puzzling that the geography of
distant places can be taught and brought alive
to students who have never been there, or even
that one person can understand the street directions
given by another. The fact that we never
simply see what is before us differs only in dei«
Smith, op. cit., footnote 12, p. 142.
212 Yi-Fu TuAN June
gree from the fact that we can see "in the
mind's eye" what we have never actually seen.
IMAGERY, SCHEMATA, AND ATTENTION
Imagery and schemata have been described
separately. Their different functions in cognition
and behavior are suggested by the relative
importance of the role that attention plays. To
see in the mind's eye places we have not visited
requires such concentrated attention that the
effort immobilizes us. Distant journeys begin in
the armchair where Edens and Utopias are concocted.
By contrast, consider the degree of imaginative
effort and attention required in routine
travel. We drive toward the city and as we
do so we notice the prominent landmarks, the
church spire to the right, the war memorial to
the left, and the bridge ahead that has to be
crossed. These we notice but between them are
the numerous features that escape our attention;
they are taken for granted. Orientation in
a new environment is among the more difficult
cognitive tasks, yet once the environment has
become familiar and we have established a habitual
route it is possible to move in it with
only minimal focal attention, and without the
conscious recourse to imagery.
Image, whether of the imaginative or the
memory kind, is perhaps always the result of
attention. Prominent features such as a tower
or a bridge become the foci of our perceptual
fields. We see them now, and they may return
to us later as memory-images, but much cognitive
activity in daily life is preattentive. Preattentive
processes are limited to the immediate
present; they affect immediate bodily motion
and attention itself. Unlike focal attention, preattentive
processes do not result in the storage
of information that can be retrieved later as images.i'
They provide the parts out of which
focal attention may synthesize many different
scenes. When we say of a place that it looks
familiar, what probably happens is that the act
of visual synthesis is the same as an earlier one:
the place can therefore look familiar even
though it has undergone substantial physical
change.^^ The act of visual synthesis is an effort
of constructive attention that makes use of
the partial clues and units provided by preattentive
processes. This is not all: another and
deeper level of cognition is involved. When we
look at the college library, it is not just any
building but one of a particular kind that has
some special significance for us; it is also recognized
in its spatial and temporal setting. These
frames of reference are the subconscious schemata
that guide perception and imagination.
They are the third level of cognition that undergirds
attentive and preattentive processes. Schemata,
especially those of space and time, are
in part genetically determined; in part they are
the nonspecific but organized representation of
past experience.^*
What happens when attention wanes, as, for
example, when we are tired? The power to envisage
an imaginary world is lost. Objects
around us lose their vividness and particularity.
The mind is susceptible to invasion by memoryimages.
When tired and inattentive we can still
drive a car or walk around obstacles in familiar
space. It is the one cognitive ability we retain.
Colin Wilson gives a picturesque account of
how fatigue might affect attention and yet leave
our motor activity more or less intact.^"
In the morning you might have noticed that one of
the girls had nice legs and that the other had recently
dyed her hair. Now they are merely "two
girls"; the filter cuts out all unnecessary detail. If
you are very tired, you might not even notice that
they are girls; you are merely aware that there are
two other people in the carriage with you. Later,
you cannot remember whether they were men or
women. The mind has progressed further in the direction
of abstraction. It retains enough sense of
time and place to steer you back home, but the
"order" it imposes on the world is now of the most
arbitrary kind, a few bare lines of latitude and lon-
gitude.
IT Uldc Neisser, Cognitive Psychology (New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967), p. 93.
18 Neisser, op. cit., footnote 17, p. 98.
19 Neisser, op. cit., footnote 17, pp. 286-89.
20 Colin Wilson, Origins of the Sexual Impulse
(London: Arthur Barker Ltd., 1963), p. 66. Spatial
ability necessary to human survival does not seem to
require a high order of intelligence. Is this why professional
geographers look offended when lay people expect
them to know where the comer drugstore is?
K. S. Lashley discussed an experiment by L. A. Pechstein
in which rats and human subjects learned mazes
of identical pattern, and in which the rats showed to
rather good advantage. With simple enough habits the
lower species, the feebleminded, and the brain-damaged
can learn about as fast as a normal person; K. S.
Lashley, "Learning: I. Nervous Mechanisms in Learning,"
in Carl Murchison, ed.. The Foundations of Experimental
Psychology (Worcester: Clark University
Press, 1929), p. 535.
1975 IMAGES AND MENTAL MAPS 213
ENVOI
Social scientists show increasing interest in
mental phenomena; these can be very elusive.
Behaviorists have reason to overlook them. If
we are to study the mental world descriptions
should be full and precise rather than encapsulated
in metaphorical shorthand. Terms like
image, pictures in the head, and mental map
have tended to become vague entities that do
not correspond to psychological reality. Metaphors
have heuristic value if they are not taken
literally. It cannot be assumed that people walk
about with pictures in the head, or that people's
spatial behavior is guided by picture-like
images and mental maps that are like real maps.
The study of people's mental world in the
course of daily living requires that we do not
impose on it the specialized categories of the
academic and artistic professions. Geographers
run the risk of seeing maps in people's heads,
just as art historians are perhaps inclined to put
undue emphasis on picture-images.
Perception is no longer a novelty among
geographers. Much research has been done and
published in recent years. It is in the nature of
a new field to venture out boldly without too
much concern for the appropriateness of terms,
the significance of concepts, and logical respectability.
A time comes, however, when a
new field must pause in its flight to reconsider
the soundness of its foundation and the kinds
of questions it asks. Perceptual geography has
reached such a stage. As we pause to examine
concepts like imagery and schemata we may
discover that mental phenomena have interest
for us not only as academic geographers but
as ordinarily curious human beings. Their study
suggests answers to questions that all thinking
people ask. How do we recognize places and
find our way among them? Are our movements
guided by something like pictures in the head?
What is the relationship between perception and
the imaginative faculty that enables us to envisage
places we have not directly experienced?
How is it possible to give street directions to
another person? How can the geography of
strange lands be taught? If the questions sound
naive, it may be because—like the blunt queries
of precocious children—they are deep.