Digital maps increasingly replace paper maps because they are accessible, regularly updated, and customizable. Yet they often weaken spatial orientation skills and create technological dependency. One possible solution is supporting navigation without extra cognitive effort by designing maps that address spatially responsive brain cells. These cells are thought to be involved in the construction of an internal spatial representation. As animal studies have shown that the perception of environmental boundaries contributes to the stabilization of firing behavior, we examined boundary effects on path integration (PI) in screen-based and virtual reality (VR) settings. This allowed us to test whether the effect is robust across formats with different immersion and self-motion feedback. Participants completed PI tasks in a virtual arena while viewing a briefly displayed elevated line, wall, or no artificial boundary. It was expected that perceived boundaries would stabilize the activity of spatially responsive cells, such as grid cells. This is likely to contribute to a reduction in PI errors. Results showed a supportive tendency for the line condition, whereas the wall condition produced the highest errors. This pattern was comparable across both media. The findings suggest that the effect of spatial boundary cues depends on their design and perceptual properties.

The subjective perception of safety in public space is a crucial indicator of urban participation, shaping how people experience and navigate their surroundings. Urban fear spaces highlight how physical, social, and emotional factors unequally structure access to and use of public environments, linking spatial perception to social justice. This paper addresses the question: What opportunities and limitations does a mixed-methods approach—combining immersive Virtual Reality (VR), electrodermal activity (EDA) measurement, and semi-structured interviews—offer for examining subjective perceptions of urban fear? It offers a methodological reflection on an exploratory study of potential fear spaces on the campus of Ruhr University Bochum, hypothesizing that mixed-methods integration reveals non-conscious arousal patterns inaccessible via verbal data alone. We discuss methodological potentials and limitations in integrating physiological data within qualitative frameworks. The study design comprised VR simulation, physiological signal acquisition, and qualitative interpretation and triangulation. Findings show that combining immersive VR with EDA detects non-conscious physiological arousal patterns that would remain inaccessible through verbal data alone, while simultaneously revealing substantial interpretative challenges that necessitate qualitative contextualization. Integrating interviews proved vital for linking physiological patterns to subjective meaning. The reflection concludes with implications for applying such multimodal approaches in participatory urban planning and spatial research.

Digital navigation systems facilitate goal-directed travel but reduce active engagement with the surrounding environment—a process critical for the formation of allocentric cognitive maps. Neuroscientific evidence reveals that spatial orientation relies on the coordinated activity of specialized spatially tuned neuronal populations, including place cells, head direction cells, grid cells, and border cells. This article introduces the specific properties of these spatially tuned cells, which encode central components of spatial information such as position, direction, distance, boundaries, and object relationships. Cell activities are continuously modulated by the perception of stable landmarks and environmental boundaries. This could form the basis for a “neurocartographic” approach that focuses on the systematic use of these cell activities to support spatial orientation. Enhancing the visual salience of landmarks and boundary structures, as well as integrating Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality(AR)-based components, may strengthen the metric representation of space—particularly grid cell–based coding. The overarching objective of this approach is to promote the development of allocentric and egocentric spatial representations during both real-world navigation and map-based wayfinding, thereby counteracting the decline in navigational abilities observed with the widespread use of digital turn-by-turn systems.

The choice of suitable color palettes is a central task in thematic cartography. Established palette libraries such as ColorBrewer 2.0 provide cartographically proven color schemes, but they account only to a limited extent for the specific visual context of a background map. Particularly in web-based mapping environments, basemaps vary widely in lightness, colorfulness, texture, and semantic density. This paper introduces CartoPalette v4.2, a basemap-dependent tool for generating thematic color palettes. The system combines a trained Conditional Variational Autoencoder model (CVAE) with explicit scoring, minimum domain checks, constrained reranking, and optional CIELAB-color-space-based repair. The goal is not the automation of cartographic design, but a transparent, traceable decision aid. The benchmark comprised 40 basemaps from held-out test locations, drawn from the ten map styles included in the training data, together with two palette types and four class counts. In this setting, 90% of CartoPalette’s suggestions scored higher than the corresponding best available ColorBrewer palette. In about 83% of cases, the visual contrast to the background map was greater than with ColorBrewer. The results show that explicitly incorporating the basemap context offers a clear added value over classical palette libraries. These findings therefore refer to previously unseen locations within basemap styles represented during training. Transfer to entirely new styles has not yet been evaluated.

The use of extended reality (XR) hardware for virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications provides new opportunities for innovative spatial research. It enables ways for immersive (re-)presentation of and interaction with spatial environments that are not possible with monitor-based studies. Simultaneously, using XR hardware can either extend opportunities of studies in physical material environments with virtual augmentations or provide extensive experimental control over stimuli and distractors by exposing participants to fully virtual spatial representations. However, these new research approaches require adjustments to the planning and execution of spatial studies. Furthermore, new challenges such as the occurrence of VR sickness or the need for accurate spatial tracking under different environmental conditions must be addressed. In this article, we examine basic potentials, challenges, and requirements associated with spatial research with XR hardware. Furthermore, we address inherent trade-offs of various design decisions, such as the selection of a specific head-mounted display (HMD), software tools, and general experiment design characteristics such as available locomotion methods and stimulus presentation. By providing an overview of important issues associated with the design of spatial studies with XR hardware, we aim to give spatial researchers an entry point into the development of VR and AR studies, or to offer additional food for thought for researchers with initial XR experience.

This article explores the significance of various forms of fallibilism in the context of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and its applications in cartography. Fallibilism, as an epistemological approach, emphasizes the fundamental fallibility of knowledge (here particularly scientific knowledge and AI-generated knowledge) and calls for critical reflection on its limits and uncertainties. Five variants of fallibilism (epistemological, methodological, ontological, pragmatic, and neopragmatic) are examined in this context. The epistemological approach emphasizes the provisional nature of knowledge, while the methodological approach focuses on the need for error-tolerant methods. Ontological fallibilism questions fundamental assumptions about reality, and pragmatic and neopragmatic fallibilism emphasize the practical utility of knowledge and iterative development. The neopragmatic approach, which integrates all other perspectives, offers a flexible and practice-oriented framework. This framework promotes the creation of useful, dynamic, and inclusive cartographic applications. The article discusses how generative AI can be utilized within the neopragmatic framework of fallibilism to constructively address uncertainties and develop socially relevant solutions, particularly in the realm of cartography.

Rapid urbanization and climate impacts have raised concerns about the emergence and aggravation of urban heat island effects. In Africa, studies have focused more on big cities due to their growing populations and high climate impact, while mid-sized cities remain under-studied, with limited comparative insights into their distinct characteristics. This study therefore provided a spatiotemporal analysis of land use land cover change (LULCC) and surface urban heat islands (SUHI) effects in the Nigerian mid-sized cities of Akure and Osogbo from 2014 to 2023. This study used Landsat 8 and 9 imagery (2014 and 2023) and analyzed data via Google Earth Engine and ArcGIS Pro 3.4. Results showed that Akure’s built areas increased significantly from 164.026 km2 to 224.191 km2 while Osogbo witnessed a smaller expansion from 41.808 km2 to 58.315 km2 in built areas. This study identified Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and emissivity patterns associated with vegetation and thermal emissions and a positive association between LST and urbanization. The findings across Akure and Osogbo cities established that LULCC has different impacts on SUHI effects. As a result, evidence from a mid-sized city might not be extended to other cities of similar size and socioeconomic characteristics without caution.

This study introduces PictoAI, a custom AI tool developed by the cartographic research team at Ruhr University Bochum for the generation of cartographic pictograms. This study also evaluates its effectiveness compared to traditional pictograms used by OpenStreetMap (OSM). In thematic cartography, the clarity and interpretability of pictograms are crucial for effective communication, yet user interpretation can differ from expert-designed pictogram meanings. By using artificial intelligence, specifically a custom GPT model integrated with DALL-E by OpenAI, PictoAI offers an approach for the automated generation of visually consistent and thematically appropriate pictograms. An empirical study involving 70 participants compared the interpretability of 24 AI-generated pictograms with the equivalent OSM pictograms. Results show that PictoAI-generated pictograms were significantly more interpretable, with a correct response rate of 67.26 https://chatgpt.com/g/g-1465GB5y0-pictoai ).

The present article explores possibilities for a new theoretical framework in cartography based on a neopragmatist approach. Starting with an outline of Traditional and Critical Cartography, a neopragmatist perspective is developed that promotes inclusivity and problem-solving orientation. This approach draws on the analytical framework of Karl Popper’s Three Worlds Theory, specifically the Theory of Three Spaces. Neopragmatism emphasizes the production of useful knowledge over absolute truth and acknowledges the contingency and flexible interpretability of cartographic representations. In this context, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is described as a dynamic tool for problem-solving, capable of supporting continuous learning and application-oriented adaptation. By employing AI within a neopragmatist framework in cartography, new possibilities emerge for integrating and utilizing diverse social perspectives and (geospatial) data. This approach enables an expansion of the theoretical and practical applicability of cartography. Finally, the article illustrates that the deconstruction—building on J. B. Harley’s influential article Deconstructing the Map (1989)—and reconstruction of maps must exist in a recursive relationship to enable a context- and solution-oriented cartography.