School of Library and Information Science, University of Pittsburgh
Abstract
Past research has shown that knowledge structures are critical in the encoding of spatial information, yet, at the same time, result in systematic distortions in spatial judgments. In order to represent the combined effects of discrete knowledge structures, such as route membership, and continuous spatial information, such as landmark location, a parallel distributed processing(PDP) model is proposed. The model is based on the interactive activation approach of McClelland and Rumelhart (1983) for modeling human information storage and retrieval; in it, the position of each location is represented simultaneously on several maps. Using this model, the experiments of McNamara, (1986) and McNamara, Ratcliff, and McKoon (1984) are simulated, resulting in qualitative agreement with the data. In addition to the simulation results, several extensions to model are discussed
