Vague cognitive regions in geography and geographic information science

Cognitive regions are regions in the mind, reflecting informal ways individuals and cultural groups organize their understanding of earth landscapes. Cognitive region boundaries are typically substantially vague and their membership functions are substantially variable – the transition from outside to inside the region is imprecise or vague, and different places within the region are not equally strong or clear as exemplars of the region. Methods for assessing and cartographically depicting cognitive regions, as with other vague geographic regions, have traditionally implied an inappropriate level of boundary sharpness and membership uniformity, such as when boundaries are mapped as precise lines. Research in recent decades has explored methods for assessing and depicting boundary vagueness and membership variability, either within or across individuals, but has still assumed homogeneity and regularity in the vagueness and variability. In this article, we present two studies that assess the cognitive regi...