Cognitive scientists study many different phenomena within the general topic of spatial cognition.
Those concerned with environmental spatial perception and cognition study how intelligent agents build internal representations of physical space from perceptual experience and inference, the nature of these representations, and how these representations guide action. Other cognitive scientists are concerned with how spatial information is communicated linguistically and through graphic devices, such as maps and diagrams. Some others study the power of spatial metaphors, both in language and graphics, for communicating and reasoning about non-spatial information. In addition to these theoretical concerns, recent technological advances have given rise to an array of applications that depend heavily on assumptions as to the nature of spatial cognition, in particular interfaces to geographical information systems, the integration of vision and natural language processing, route guidance systems, multimedia visualization systems, multimodal interfaces and virtual reality. These advances have highlighted the need to better understand human spatial cognition, so that we can design computer and information systems that interface with the human information processing system.