COGNITIVE MAPPING MEETS SEMANTIC NETWORKS

Cognitive mapping has been a valuable tool in understanding how indivi duals view their external environment It has been used successfully to investigate crisis decision making, juror decision making, and intern ational negotiation, and may find further use as a support tool in neg otiation and mediation. This article presents a method for enhanced co gnitive mapping-WorldView, which uses the symbol-based formalism of se mantic networks. WorldView provides important advantages over more tra ditional cognitive mapping and assists in the systematic study of beli ef system content and decision process. WorldView eliminates constrain ts on represented relationships and captures more information than pre vious content analysis systems,for belief structures, provides aggrega tion over texts or subject responses, provides a synonym facility for collapsing similar concepts, incorporates structural and comparative m easures for analysis, and constructs manipulable cognitive maps that p rovide a basis for process models of belief change and decision making .