Learning geographical information from hypothetical maps

Abstract

People show biases or distortions in their geographical judgments, such as mistakenly judging Rome to be south of Chicago (the Chicago-Rome illusion). These errors may derive from either perceptual heuristics or categorical organization. However, previous work on geographic knowledge has generally examined people's judgments of real-world locations for which learning history is unknown. This article reports experiments on the learning of hypothetical geographical spaces, in which participants acquired information in a fashion designed to control real-world factors, such as variable travel experiences or stereotypes about other countries, as well as to mimic initial encounters with locations through reading or conventional school-based geography education. Five experiments combine to suggest that biases in judgment based on learning of this kind are different in key regards from those seen with real-world geography and may be based more on the use of perceptual heuristics than on categorical organization.

Learning fine-grained and category information in navigable real-world space

“…What is less known, however, is when categorical knowledge about real-world geographical entities at several scales (e.g., navigational, global) begins to bias absolute location estimates (but see Kerkman, Friedman, Brown, Stea, & Carmichael, 2003). It is also worth noting that Newcombe and Chiang (2007), who trained people extensively on hypothetical geographic spaces (made-up countries within continents) in order to control for learning history, found that biases in participants' judgments differed from those found in real-world geography. They concluded that the biases in the hypothetical spaces were likely to have been based on perceptual heuristics rather than on categorical organization.…”

“…They particularly address differences between relatively short-term visual memory for dots presented one at a time and longer lasting memories for spatial relations among entities experienced together over much longer time periods (see Friedman, 2009). Thus, the category-adjustment model is constrained, in that it appears to apply primarily to spatial representations in relatively short-term memory; even extensive training on hypothetical maps (Newcombe & Chiang, 2007) did not produce the kinds of category effects seen with real-world geographic and navigable spaces. APPENDIX Each participant's reconstruction of the campus was fit to the actual location, as represented on the map shown in Figure 1.…”

“…With respect to the first question, most research in this field has involved relatively small-scale spaces, such as a computer screen (e.g., Huttenlocher, Hedges, Corrigan, & Crawford, 2004;Newcombe & Chiang, 2007), a sandbox (Huttenlocher, Newcombe, & Sandberg, 1994), a scale model (e.g., DeLoache, 1989DeLoache, , 2000Hund & Plumert, 2002, 2003, or a small room (e.g., Hermer & Spelke, 1994, 1996McNamara, Rump, & Werner, 2003;Mou, McNamara, Valiquette, & Rump, 2004). Other research has been conducted with respect to large-scale global spaces that are not typically navigable (e.g., the countries in North America; Friedman & Brown, 2000a, 2000bFriedman et al, 2005;Friedman & Montello, 2006).…”

Maps and Biased Familiarity: Cognitive Distance Error and Reference Points

“…At different scales, this might be a group of individuals living in the same neighbourhood, city, state, or country (Golledge and others 1992;Glicksohn 1994;Lloyd 2005a;Huynh and others 2008). The same might also apply to a group of individuals who have learned the same spatial information from a novel cartographic map (Newcombe and Chiang 2007).…”

Perception of Space by Multiple Intrinsic Frames of Reference

“…The hierarchical organization of psychological space is also documented in other tasks of geographical judgment [for a review, see 10]. The view of perceptual heuristics [11], [13] posits that the biases or distortions occur due to heuristics derived from principles of perceptual organization.…”