This book presents recent research on the role of space as a mechanism in language use and learning. It proceeds from the notion that cognition in real time, developmental time, and over evolutionary time occurs in space, and that the physical properties of space may provide insights into basic cognitive processes, including memory, attention, action, and perception. It looks at how physical space and landmarks are used in cognitive representations and serve as the basis of human cognition in a range of core mechanisms to index memories and ground meanings that are not themselves explicitly about space. The editors have brought together experimental psychologists, computer scientists, robotocists, linguists, and researchers in child language in order to consider the nature and applications of this research and in particular its implications for understanding the processes involved in language acquisition.

Documented Landscape, the seventh volume in the Pictorial Worlds series, presents a selection of images from the archives of the Geobotanical Institute Rubel and of Carl Schroeter, which are being kept as part of the ETH Zurich's extensive image archive. Founded by Eduard Rubel (1876-1960) in 1918 in Zurich and later donated to the ETH, the 'Geobotanical Institute Rubel' conducted pioneering research in the area of botanical biodiversity in the Alps. Rubel's teacher, the botanist and ETH professor Carl Schroeter (1855-1939), was himself a pioneer of biodiversity and landscape conservation. Rubel and Schroeter were some of the earliest botanists to use photography as a means to document their research, thus making it available to a wider public and drawing attention to their early efforts in environmentalism. While the photo archives bear witness to a bygone era, their depiction of a changing landscape and progressing human interference are still strikingly on topic today. Sometimes showing near-arcadian scenes, the images are nevertheless highly realistic in their exact scientific documentation of the alpine biosphere. An in-depth introduction by historian and writer Ruedi Weidmann accompanies some ninety exceptional images selected from the comprehensive collection. Text in English and German.

The Image Archive of the main library at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH-Bibliothek) is home to a vast collection of photographs. It includes material collected by professors and other staff at the ETH, images created and collected by institutes and chairs within the ETH, but also the entire archives of companies or other institutions, such as Switzerland's legendary former national airline Swissair (1931 - 2001), or private collections bequeathed to ETH-Bibliothek. The aim of the new book series 'Pictorial Worlds. Photographs from the ETH-Bibliothek's Image Archive' is to build a bridge between analytical treatment of historical image sources and the interest in individual photographs for any possible reason. One of the collections held at the Image Archive has been put together by Swiss entrepreneur Adolf Feller (1879 - 1931) and his daughter Elisabeth (1910 - 1973). Unique in size, scope and period covered, it comprises 54,000 postcards from 1889 - 1980. It documents comprehensively what can be called the Golden Age of picture postcards before World War I, with its enormous diversity of motifs, radical changes of style in design and when postcards had their heyday as a communication medium. The collection's main focus is on images of individual sites, places and landscapes in 140 countries. Around 15,000 motifs are from Switzerland. The period best represented in the collection is from 1893 - 1930. The World in Pocket-size Format is a documentation of this magnificent collection. The book is also an illustrated history of this means of communication that has had its time of utmost importance in human relationships.