A Quantitative-Comparative Approach to Analysis of Distortion in Mental Maps

Waterman, Stanley; Gordon, Dan

doi:10.1111/j.0033-0124.1984.00326.x

Cited by 80 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…When the director indicted that the description was finished, the matcher clicked one final time in agreement. The matcher's reconstruction was evaluated using bidimensional regression and an index of distortion (Waterman & Gordon, 1984). The bidimensional regression provided a measure of rotation error indicating how close the reconstructed orientation was to the intended orientation (as defined by the offset condition).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Spatial memory and perspective taking

2004

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Giving directions or describing an environment often requires assuming perspectives other than one's own. We employed a spatial perspective-taking task to investigate how describing familiar versus novel perspectives affects subsequent memory. One participant (the director) viewed a display of objects from a single perspective and described the display to another participant (the matcher) from a perspective that varied by 0º, 45º, 90º, 135º, or 180º from the viewing perspective. Following the description, we assessed the director's memory for the display, using judgments of relative direction, scene recognition, and map drawing. The participants imagined and recognized familiar views faster and/or more accurately than novel views. Moreover, different tasks showed different degrees of facilitation for the visually perceived and described views, suggesting multiple representations for different aspects of spatial memory. These findings emphasize the importance of understanding distinctions among spatial experiences and underscore differences in the tasks used to probe spatial memory.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Map accuracy was assessed using a DI based on bidimensional regression (Waterman & Gordon, 1984). Maps were generally very accurate (mean DI ϭ 7.2, SD ϭ 1.34), and no differences were observed for different offset conditions (F Ͻ 1).…”

Section: Map Drawingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatial memory and perspective taking

2004

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“…Another parameter, distortion index (DI), is closely related to r 2 . This measure, originally proposed by Waterman and Gordon (1984) and expanded by Friedman and Kohler, denotes the percentage of distortion in the sketch map and is reported as a percentage hypothetically ranging from 0 to 100. DI 2 is the proportion of variance of the sketch map's landmark configuration that remains unexplained by BDR.…”

Section: Bidimensional Regression and Novel Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gardony Map Drawing Analyzer: Software for quantitative analysis of sketch maps

2015

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Sketch maps are effective tools for assessing spatial memory. However, despite their widespread use in cognitive science research, sketch map analysis techniques remain unstandardized and carry limitations. In the present article, we present the Gardony Map Drawing Analyzer (GMDA), an open-source software package for sketch map analysis. GMDA combines novel and established analysis techniques into a graphical user interface that permits rapid computational sketch map analysis. GMDA calculates GMDA-unique measures based on pairwise comparisons between landmarks, as well as bidimensional regression parameters (Friedman & Kohler, 2003), which together reflect sketch map quality at two levels: configural and individual landmark. The configural measures assess the overall landmark configuration and provide a whole-map analysis. Individual landmark measures, introduced in GMDA, assess individual landmark placement and indicate how individual landmarks contribute to the configural scores. Together, these measures provide a more complete psychometric picture of sketch map analysis, allowing for comparisons between sketch maps and between landmarks. The calculated measures reflect specific and cognitively relevant aspects of interlandmark spatial relationships, including distance and angular representation. GMDA supports complex environments (up to 48 landmarks) and two software modes that capture aspects of maps not addressed by existing techniques, such as landmark size and shape variation and interlandmark containment relationships. We describe the software and its operation and present a formal specification of calculation procedures for its unique measures. We then validate the software by demonstrating the capabilities and reliability of its measures using simulation and experimental data. The most recent version of GMDA is available at www. aarongardony.com/tools/map-drawing-analyzer.

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“…All 11 of the subjects were able to correctly reproduce the layout of the environment, as well as the correct landmark locations. However, we decided not to perform a quantitative analysis of map-drawing performance, because it seems difficult to identify the nature of a spatial representation with bidimensional regression coefficients or related measures (Waterman and Gordon, 1984;Spiers et al, 2001;Friedman and Kohler, 2003). Montello et al (2004) have argued that an accurate map can be drawn from a quantitatively scaled route representation.…”

Section: Behavioral Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Dissociable Retrosplenial and Hippocampal Contributions to Successful Formation of Survey Representations

Wolbers

Büchel²

2005

J. Neurosci.

291

266

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During everyday navigation, humans encounter complex environments predominantly from a first-person perspective. Behavioral evidence suggests that these perceptual experiences can be used not only to acquire route knowledge but also to directly assemble map-like survey representations. Most studies of human navigation focus on the retrieval of previously learned environments, and the neural foundations of integrating sequential views into a coherent representation are not yet fully understood. We therefore used our recently introduced virtual-reality paradigm, which provides accuracy and reaction-time measurements precisely indicating the emergence of survey knowledge, and functional magnetic resonance imaging while participants repeatedly encoded a complex environment from a first-person ground-level perspective. Before the experiment, we gave specific instructions to induce survey learning, which, based on the clear evidence for emerging survey knowledge in the behavioral data from 11 participants, proved successful. Neuroimaging data revealed increasing activation across sessions only in bilateral retrosplenial cortices, thus paralleling behavioral measures of map expertise. In contrast, hippocampal activation did not follow absolute performance but rather reflected the amount of knowledge acquired in a given session. In other words, hippocampal activation was most prominent during the initial learning phase and decayed after performance had approached ceiling level. We therefore conclude that, during navigational learning, retrosplenial areas mainly serve to integrate egocentric spatial information with cues about self-motion, whereas the hippocampus is needed to incorporate new information into an emerging memory representation.

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A Quantitative-Comparative Approach to Analysis of Distortion in Mental Maps

Cited by 80 publications

References 14 publications

Spatial memory and perspective taking

Spatial memory and perspective taking

Gardony Map Drawing Analyzer: Software for quantitative analysis of sketch maps

Dissociable Retrosplenial and Hippocampal Contributions to Successful Formation of Survey Representations

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