Places as Fuzzy Locational Categories

This paper offers a new way of considering places as special types of categories, in human cognition of larger-scale environments. This may provide an explanatory cognitive model for a range of known phenomena from environmental psychology and human geography - notably places' semantic salience and vague, unstable boundaries. Using such a model to apply suitable classification approaches may enhance geographic information (GI) for key public- facing users, such as emergency services and planners. Two empirical studies confirmed that a spatially extended place (e.g., suburban locality or neighborhood) may be stored as a category whose exemplars are memorable individual locations or scenes. Using a questionnaire-based method to partly replicate key findings from the semantic memory literature (Barsalou, 1985; Lynch, Coley and Medin 2000), the studies tested the relevance to such places of known semantic memory phenomena including graded membership, typicality versus ideals, expertise and context effects. The discussion considers the link between semantic and spatial vagueness of places.