The chapter provides an overview of linguistic, neuropsychological and experimental psychological approaches and findings
that support the idea that spatial relation categories are analog, overlapping, internally structured categories based on
prototype comparison and with fuzzy boundaries. The main focus is on viewpoint dependent relations (direction relations) in
visuospatial cognition. The notion of a frame of reference in spatial cognition is related to the more general concept of
a frame of reference in categorization. Categorization constitutes the bridge between spatial vision and spatial language.
For visual space, a spatial framework is proposed that is based on perceptually salient directions which act as standard values
in relation to which object relations can be judged.
This work was supported by the Special Research Group “Situated Artificial Communicators” (SFB 360) of the German Science
Foundation (DFG), project B1: “Interaction of visual and linguistic information processing”.