La rappresentazione del paesaggio attraverso le mappe cognitive

Within the framework of Environmental Psychology this study deepened the relationship between landscape and environment to understand what kind of landscape concept is represented in inhabitants’ minds. We analysed cognitive mapping like a process by which people learn, remember, and process spatial information about an environment and produce sketch maps (Lynch, 1960). In particular we considered landscape a specific spatial phenomena with high social value because it represents ecosystem diversity (di Castri, Balaji, 2002) and assumed sketch maps as social representation of it. Our results suggest cognitive maps are the outcome of a series of psychological elaboration in which memories, residents’ social and cultural background, impressions, associations, restorative experience of self-regulation are processed and become an important component of place identity (Korpela, Hartig, Kaiser, Fuhrer, 2001)