This is characterized by an interest in seeking process explanations for specific spatial actions. These processes include perception, learning, forming attitudes, memorizing, recalling, and using spatial thinking and reasoning to explain human activities in different environmental settings. See Golledge, in S. Aitken and G. Valentine (2006). It sets out to ‘humanize homo economicus, to recognize that people do not have complete information, are not always distance minimizing, are embedded in networks of social relations, and therefore may base decisions on factors other than sheer economic rationality. It specifically recognized the role of cognition and the importance of social and cultural values and constraints, plus all the institutional, economic, and physical factors that characterize the public, ‘objective’ environment’ (Couclelis and Golledge (1983) AAAG 73, 3). Behavioural geography was criticized as inherently positivist, severing individuals from their social and cultural contexts. Nonetheless, behavioural approaches have been gaining ground in the field of economics; see Strauss (2008) J. Econ. Geog. 8, 2, who calls for a renewed behavioural economic geography, ‘without adopting, wholesale, its ways of conceptualising economic man’ (sic).

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