Mining Spatial Co-orientation Patterns for Analyzing Portfolios of Spatial Cognitive Development

Spatial cognition concerns how human interpret spatial complexity. Cognitive maps are mostly used to test the spatial cognition. Analyzing cognitive maps drawn by students is helpful for teachers to understand students’ spatial cognitive ability and to draft geography teaching plans. Cognitive maps constitute the portfolios of spatial cognitive development. With the advance of e-learning technology, we can analyze portfolios of spatial cognitive development by spatial data mining of cognitive images. In this paper, we investigate the spatial co-orientation patterns for analyzing portfolios of spatial cognitive development. Spatial co-orientation patterns refer to objects that frequently occur with the same spatial orientation, e.g. left, right, below, etc., among images. We propose BFS-based approach for mining co-orientation patterns and utilize this as a tool for analyzing portfolios spatial cognitive development of students.