Perceiving, Remembering, Going About the City Social Analysis of Urban Everyday Life Meeting 3 (February 6, 2014) Nikita Kharlamov, AAU

Recap on Ecological Science Complex nested systems Co-evolution of different elements and subsystems (e.g., a behavioral pattern such as cycling + cycling lanes) Focus on person-environment-behavior transactions

Perception of Environment Starting point: being-in-the-world (Heidegger), before all ‘culture,’ ‘cognition,’ ‘reflection,’ etc. How do we learn to be in the world? “Knowledge of the world is gained by moving about in it, exploring it, attending to it, ever alert to the signs by which it is revealed. Learning to see… is a matter not of acquiring schemata for mentally constructing the environment but of acquiring the skills for direct perceptual engagement with its constituents, human and non-human, animate and inanimate.” (Ingold, Perception of Environment, 2000, p. 55) Learning is education of attention – learning to perceive patterns, see important regularities in environment, through action on it

Some fundamental facts about human biological psychology We have evolved to move about and act upon environment long before language and formal means of transmission of knowledge were evolved  basic capacity for fast pattern recognition Human perception is active: - geared towards action and needs of action - biased towards active search of information - has adaptive (learning) capacities Examples: quick recognition of fast moving objects (on the level of the retina already); learning language through use of language (not through instruction in it); biased visual processing of visual stimuli – e.g., gaze is naturally attracted to human faces

Case: Yarbus studying Repin Alfred Yarbus ( ) – Soviet pioneer of the study of visual perception of complex images Ilya Repin – Unexpected Visitor (1888) Middle: scanpath (movement of the gaze) when studying the picture freely, without any constraint or instruction. Note that the pattern is nowhere near random; it also does not ‘scan’ the entire scene like a computer scanner would; gaze is attracted to faces Right: instruction to estimate the economic status of the family Key point: this makes perfect evolutionary sense, given that perception is always in-the-world, for purposes of acting in it (surviving in it)

Affordance James J. Gibson ( ) – ecological psychology, Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979) Affordance – a property of the environment (an object) that allows an organism to act in it (on that object) Learning (development of skill – after Ingold) changes affordances (e.g., a driver learns to use the road to parallel park) Perception depends on affordances (e.g., a tennis ball that I can reach looks larger to me compared to one I can’t reach – even if the ball size, distance, and retinal projection size are all constant)

Does this look familiar?

Cognitive Maps, Wayfinding, Navigation Edward C. Tolman: experiments with rats finding their way in a maze. “In the course of learning something like a field map of the environment gets established in the rat’s brain” (Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men, 1948, p. 192) Common assumption: humans form a representation of space in the brain, and this representation is the basis for spatial behavior (such as wayfinding – finding your way from Aeroport subway st. to Kochnowsky building) Long-standing assumption 1: maps are topological representations passively stored in the brain, possibly degrading over time, and retrieved when needed (e.g., at the stage of planning spatial behavior) Long-standing assumption 2: the ‘gold standard of normalcy’ in human spatial cognition is formation of allocentric (person-position- independent), configurational (preserving scaled distances between points in space) knowledge– just like a nice large fold-out geographic map! {Hence the dreaded «топографический кретинизм»}

Troubles with assumptions We have only learned to make configurational maps very recently (possibly between ~9-11 thousand years ago). We have only learned to fly about 3 thousand years ago. For the majority of human history, and for the majority of humanity, wayfinding has been successfully executed without any navigational aids (maps, descriptions, drawings – or smartphones) Case: Micronesian navigators traversing hundreds of kilometers of open water with no land in sight, and with no navigational aids (e.g., compass)  learning to recognize patterns in water color, etc., as well as sequential ‘star paths’ that are dynamic and not fully ‘allocentric’

Cognitive maps and wayfinding in the wild Systematic distortions in cognitive maps (hierarchical organization, perspective, reference points) Spiers & Maguire, Dynamic Nature of Cognition During Wayfinding, 2008: primacy of sequential processing (view from the ground, not bird’s-eye), reliance on emotional responses, active monitoring of environment, monitoring of others’ behavior Role of landmarks (anchor points) varies depending on the layout of the environment, degree of familiarity, and even mode of travel Co-developmental interweaving of navigational practices and organization of spatial knowledge: Westerners’ cognitive maps are oriented due North (Frankenstein et al., Is the Map in Our Head Oriented North?, 2012) GPS navigators vs. maps - egocentric perspective vs. allocentric perspective - quick shifts of scale and orientation vs. their stability - automated wayfinding aid - but the first generation of Western children who have grown up with more GPS navigators than paper maps is just now coming of age!

Summary Humans are naturally geared towards active perception of environment Perception and action are tightly intertwined Practices, technologies, skills, and the environment co-develop in history of human habitation Spatial knowledge and action develop through learning skills

Possible themes for photography Navigational aids in the city (maps, street names, direction signs) Practices of getting help with directions Concerted spatial behavior Technological aids and hybrids in mobility practices Representations of urban environment in art