Quantifying memories: mapping urban perception

TL;DR

This study uses a web-based geo-guessing game to systematically analyze how urban spatial features influence residents' mental maps and memories of the city.

Contribution

It introduces a large-scale dataset linking urban spatial structures with perceptual memory, revealing hidden patterns in cognitive city exploration.

Findings

Buildings with dominant shapes and bright colors are more memorable.

Historical sites significantly influence mental maps.

Spatial patterns correlate with perceptual knowledge.

Abstract

What people choose to see, like, or remember is of profound interest to city planners and architects. Previous research suggests what people are more likely to store in their memory - buildings with dominant shapes and bright colors, historical sites, and intruding signs - yet little has been done by the systematic survey. This paper attempts to understand the relationships between the spatial structure of the built environment and inhabitants' memory of the city derived from their perceptual knowledge. For this purpose, we employed the web-based visual survey in the form of a geo-guessing game. This enables us to externalize people's spatial knowledge as a large-scale dataset. The result sheds light on unknown aspects of the cognitive role in exploring the built environment, and hidden patterns embedded in the relationship between the spatial elements and the mental map.