CONCEPT
Cognitive Collages
Barbara Tversky’s term for the partial, perspectival, multi-viewpoint spatial representations that people actually construct of the domains they reason about—neither consistent survey maps nor random fragments, but assembled understandings that preserve enough structure to support inference while tolerating the vagueness and contradiction that formal representations forbid.
Your mental map of your neighborhood is not a survey map. It is assembled from routes you have walked, landmarks you have noticed, partial maps you have glimpsed, and spatial estimates made from different starting points and at different scales. These contributions do not fit together perfectly; they contain contradictions and distortions that would be obvious if you tried to draw them. Yet the
cognitive collage—
Barbara Tversky’s term for this kind of spatial understanding—is not a failed map. It is a highly functional representation that supports the spatial reasoning you actually need: finding your way to the coffee shop, estimating the time to the train station, describing a route to a visitor. A cognitive collage is partial, perspectival, and assembled from multiple viewpoints and multiple encounters with the domain. Its apparent vagueness is often a feature rather than a bug: it encodes uncertainty honestly rather than forcing