14 Qualitative Spatial Reasoning: A Theoretical Framework

Our knowledge of space starts in the raw signals of sensation, is organized through perceptual processing, and ends up being used in conceptual reasoning, both overtly and covertly. Sensation, especially vision, involves massive amounts of signal processing and attentional processes that constantly shift and select small subsets of this wealth of information for further processing. Conceptual reasoning, on the other hand, seems to operate with a much smaller number of elements. The summarization of the results of perception into elements that are amenable to conceptual reasoning requires a bridge, a means of discretizing continuous space into meaningful units. In other words, my hypothesis is that qualitative representations of space and shape provide a bridge between perceptual and conceptual processing.