Individual Differences in Map Reading Spatial Abilities Using Perceptual and Memory Processes

Lloyd, Robert; Bunch, Rick

doi:10.1559/1523040053270774

Cited by 25 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…This result is unusual, for although modest gender differences have been commonly reported for some mapreading tasks associated with navigation (e.g., Montello et al 1999;Malinowski and Gillespie 2001;Lloyd and Bunch 2005), they have not been commonly reported for thematic map reading (e.g., Gilmartin and Patton 1984;Evans 1997). There was no significant difference in the amount of time it took males or females to identify patterns.…”

Section: Animated Conditionmentioning

confidence: 59%

A Comparison of Animated Maps with Static Small-Multiple Maps for Visually Identifying Space-Time Clusters

Griffin

MacEachren

Hardisty

et al. 2006

Annals of the Association of American Geographers

112

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Although animated maps are widely promoted as ideal vehicles for learning and scientific discovery, there has been little empirical work that demonstrates their relative effectiveness in relation to static small-multiple alternatives. In this article, we attempt to clarify the issues related to the potential of animation from an explicitly geographic perspective, but one that is also grounded in broader cognitive science and human-computer interaction considerations. We compared the effectiveness of animated with static small-multiple maps, specifically in relation to map readers' ability to identify clusters that move over space and through time. In this study, we focused on several factors that might impact (or help explain) map readers' ability to correctly identify clusters. These factors included animation pace, cluster coherence, and gender. We found that map readers answer more quickly and identify more patterns correctly when using animated maps than when using static small-multiple maps. We also found that pace and cluster coherence interact so that different paces are more effective for identifying certain types of clusters (none vs. subtle vs. strong), and that there are some gender differences in the animated condition. This study is one of a small number of controlled experiments directed to the relative advantages of animated and static small-multiple maps. It provides the basis for further research that is needed to better understand the cognitive load involved in reading animated maps, to better describe and understand gender differences, and to investigate the efficacy of animated maps for other types of map reading tasks.

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Section: Animated Conditionmentioning

confidence: 59%

A Comparison of Animated Maps with Static Small-Multiple Maps for Visually Identifying Space-Time Clusters

Griffin

MacEachren

Hardisty

et al. 2006

Annals of the Association of American Geographers

112

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“…When maps are used in wayfinding, inconsistent gender differences have been reported. While some studies found that males are more accurate in map-assisted wayfinding (e.g., [16,17]) and map reading skills (e.g., [18][19][20][21]), other studies reported no differences between males and females (e.g., [19,20,22]). For example, Montello, Lovelace, Golledge and Self [22] found that males had a significantly higher accuracy than females in distance estimation but only when using knowledge acquired from traveling the real environment rather than when using map-derived knowledge.…”

Section: Gender Differences In Wayfindingmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Exploratory Study Investigating Gender Effects on Using 3D Maps for Spatial Orientation in Wayfinding

Liao

Dong

2017

IJGI

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3D representations in applications that provide self-localization and orientation in wayfinding have become increasingly popular in recent years because of technical advances in the field. However, human factors have been largely ignored while designing 3D representations in support of pedestrian navigation. This exploratory study aims to explore gender effects on using 3D maps for spatial orientation. We designed a 3D map that combines salient 3D landmarks and 2D layouts, and evaluated gender differences in their performance during direction-pointing tasks by administrating an eye tracking experiment. The results indicate there was no significant overall gender difference on performance and visual attention. However, we observed that males using the 3D map paid more attention to landmarks in the environment and performed better than when using the conventional 2D map, whereas female performance did not show any significant difference between the two types of map usage. We also observed contrary gender differences in visual attention on landmarks between the 3D and 2D maps. While males fixated longer on landmarks than females when using the 3D map, females paid more visual attention to landmarks than males when using the 2D map. In addition, verbal protocols showed that males had more confidence while make decisions. These empirical results can be helpful in the design of map-based wayfinding enhancement tools.

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“…This result can be explained by numerous studies in both perception and cognition literature that indicate that the more information that has to be distinguished and kept in working memory, the more difficult it is to reason with this information (Lloyd and Bunch 2005).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Evaluation of noise annotation lines: using noise to represent thematic uncertainty in maps

Kinkeldey

Mason

Klippel

et al. 2014

Cartography and Geographic Information Science

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Noise annotation lines are a promising technique to visualize thematic uncertainty in maps. However, their potential has not yet been evaluated in user studies. In two experiments we assessed the usability of this technique with respect to a different number of uncertainty levels as well as the influence of two design aspects of noise annotation lines: the grain and the width of the noise grid. We conducted a web-based study utilizing a qualitative comparison of two areas in 150 different maps. We recruited participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk with the majority being nonexperts with respect to the use of maps.Our findings suggest that for qualitative comparisons of 'constant uncertainty' (i.e., constant uncertainty per area) in thematic maps, noise annotation lines can be used for up to 6 uncertainty levels. During comparison of 4, 6, and 8 levels, the different designs of the technique yielded significantly different accuracies. We propose to use the 'large noise width, coarse grain' design that was most successful. For 'mixed uncertainty' (i.e., uncertainty is not constant per area) we observed a significant decrease in accuracy, but for 4 levels the technique can still be recommended.This article is a follow-up to our conference paper reporting on preliminary results of the first of the two experiments (Kinkeldey et al. 2013).

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Individual Differences in Map Reading Spatial Abilities Using Perceptual and Memory Processes

Cited by 25 publications

References 51 publications

A Comparison of Animated Maps with Static Small-Multiple Maps for Visually Identifying Space-Time Clusters

A Comparison of Animated Maps with Static Small-Multiple Maps for Visually Identifying Space-Time Clusters

An Exploratory Study Investigating Gender Effects on Using 3D Maps for Spatial Orientation in Wayfinding

Evaluation of noise annotation lines: using noise to represent thematic uncertainty in maps

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