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COGNITIVE VS TECHNOLOGICAL MAPS OF GEOSPACE // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2018. Issue 4 (18). P. 125-141

The formation of cognitive maps of geographical space is a crucial condition for an agent’s cognitive activity, determining his possible orientation as the highest psychical function. The initial way of understanding oneself in the surrounding world for humans was to correlate oneself with one’s natural dimensionality and to form an anthropomorphic system of measures and coordinates. This article considers processes of transforming natural geography into a culture-determined one, resulting in the formation of world maps based not on the objective vision of geospace but on mythological, religious, pragmatic, and ethnocentric factors. The influence of human’s technological extensions on transformation of his natural spatial ideas into cognitive schemata and on change in his spatial “worldview” is analyzed by the example of accessibility/inaccessibility of geographical objects. The paper posits that the possibility to interpret geographical knowledge and skills as symbolic and culture-determined options of the orientation ability are fixed not to natural, but technological mode of travel. Furthermore, the paper describes a special hybrid construct of orientation/locomotion that arises in the conditions of technological progress and sets a new topology of man’s cultural body, a technologically transformed topology of the surrounding world. Additionally, it is stated that any technical development does not abolish human dimensionality but only modifies it, expanding natural human abilities and identity.

Keywords: cognitive activity, identity, cognitive map, geography, geospace, technologies, anthropomorphic dimensionality, spatial orientation, transport, embodiment