ABSTRACT
Somatosensory information also seems to contribute to knowledge of another space important in navigation, the space of the body. Since its disparate beginnings, including the seminal work of the rat psychologist E. C. Tolman and the urban architect K. Lynch, to name but two, the field of cognitive maps has made fascinating progress. Important as experience may be, for people language serves as an impressive surrogate for experience. Well-told stories can bring tears to people eyes, whether from happy or funny or sad descriptions. To correct the ambiguities of the previous analyses while preserving the alliance of reference frames with reference objects, Levinson proposed a new analysis of relative, intrinsic, and absolute reference frames. A relative frame of reference is based on a person; it locates a target object relative to a reference object with respect to the person, in terms of the person’s front, back, left, and right.
