نبذة مختصرة : Spatial knowledge exists in our minds, and the only way of understanding it is through external content, such as spatial behavior or spatial language. Researchers in various disciplines have used different methods of externalization to study human spatial knowledge. For example, psychologists have focused on the recognition of different kinds of space experienced by people grouped by such categories as gender, age, educational level, and background (Cohen and Schuepfer 1980; Norman 1980; Thorndyke and Stasz 1980). Siegel and White (1975) developed a spatial-representation model based on significant landmarks and arrived at the concept of procedural knowledge. According to procedural knowledge, a unique route connects significant landmarks in a sequence and a number of such routes make up configurational knowledge--a network of spatial knowledge--leading to a comprehensive recognition of location and direction within the area covered by the network. Thorndyke (1981) proposed a similar concept, suggesting that human spatial knowledge is organized in a node-link structure. Linguists have used the analysis of space vocabulary and route description to study spatial knowledge (Wassmann 1977; Talmy 1990). Jiang (2006) derived the spatial knowledge of the Kavalan, a tribe of indigenous residents in Taiwan, from the structure of the tribe's language and the residents' description of routes. Li (2004) studied the Taiwanese Paiwan people's spatial representation by examining their route description and the vocabulary of their spatial reference frame. In the discipline of geography, some researchers have used mental maps (Lynch 1960) or spatial modeling (Zhu and Chen 2005) to analyze human spatial recognition, while others have analyzed indigenous people's recognition of their environment through environmental perception (Lowenthal 1961). Jungerius (1998) studied herb-picking indigenous residents in Kenya and found that their spatial recognition of land features was based on a judgment of landscape-ecological conditions, rather than knowledge of an absolute geometric relationship as used in the western world. Such a unique spatial recognition enabled herb pickers to adjust their working strategies without being influenced by changes in the natural environment. In contrast, anthropologists have observed how everyday spatial behavior can be affected by social, cultural, political, and other factors. Fox (1997) and Thomas (2001) proposed a concept of space, place, and landscape in their research of Austronesians. Fox proposed that space is based on directional coordinates and symbolic coordinates, place is socially constructed and personally experienced, and landscape results from the interaction between the physical characteristics of the natural environment and human experience. Thomas also thought that place is not merely a spatial location, but something with meaning, and that landscape is a network of related places. To sum up, space is a geometric configuration of the physical environment, place is formed through the human experience between culture-social activities and the natural environment, and landscape is the integration of space and place, thus a topographic vista as well as the combined interaction of human experience, ideology, semantics, and memory (Fox 1997). The spatial knowledge proposed by Siegel and White (1975) and other scholars is primarily concerned with space as defined above, and such space is mainly an urban environment in which buildings, squares, monumental towers, and other manmade features are connected by roads into networks. From a geometric viewpoint, points are connected into lines and lines are combined into areas. The living environment of Taiwan's indigenous residents, however, consists of mountains, rivers, forests, and rocks, without significant manmade landmarks, and with too few paths or trails to form a network. We wished to understand the spatial knowledge used by indigenous residents for hunting, picking plants, and moving about. …
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