Language as a mental travel guide
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Updated: Dec 15, 2025

The Spatial Memory Game: Testing the Relationship Between Spatial Language, Object Knowledge, and Spatial Cognition
Published on: February 19, 2018
Charles P Davis1,2, Gerry T M Altmann1,2, Eiling Yee1,2
1Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT06269charles.davis@uconn.edu gerry.altmann@uconn.edu eiling.yee@uconn.edu http://charlespdavis.com http://altmann.lab.uconn.edu http://yeelab.uconn.edu.
Abstract:
Gilead et al.'s approach to human cognition places abstraction and prediction at the heart of "mental travel" under a "representational diversity" perspective that embraces foundational concepts in cognitive science. But, it gives insufficient credit to the possibility that the process of abstraction produces a gradient, and underestimates the importance of a highly influential domain in predictive cognition: language, and related, the emergence of experientially based structure through time.
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