Cognitive Maps

Cognitive Maps and Relative Position

Heuristics make sense, but can cause us to miss important details and to fail to pay attention to bottom-up information

Orientation of map

Judgements are easier when your mental map and the physical map have matching orientations

Cognitive Map

Mental representation of the environment that surrounds us (e.g. neighborhoods, cities, countries). These representations have real-world settings and ecological validity (easy to relate to the real world)

Spatial Cognition

Our thoughts about spatial issues; cognitive maps, remembering the world we navigate, keeping track of objects in a spatial array.

Semantic Categories

Semantic factors influence distance estimates for specific locations (e.g.. on-campus and off-campus buildings)

Hirtle and Mascolo (1986)

Task: Learn hypothetical map of a town; estimate distance between pairs of locations Result: People tended to shift each location closer to the other sites that belonged to the same semantic cluster (e.g. DIA vs. General Lectures)

Thorndyke (1981) - Number of Intervening Cities

Task: Participants studied a map of a hypothetical region until they could reproduce it; then estimated the distance between specified pairs o cities IV: 0, 1, 2, or 3 other cities along the route between two cities Results: The number of intervening cities had a clear-cut influence on the estimates, indicating that cluttered routes seem longer and roads with complex turns seem longer than straight roads.

Tversky (1981)

Task: Participants were presented with pairs of cities and asked "which city is north (or east) of the other?" Result: Many students showed a consistent tendency to use alignment heuristic, especially for Northern cities in North America compared to southern cities in Europe

Landmark Effect

The general tendency to provide shorter estimates when traveling to a landmark rather than a non-landmark (e.g. driving from Detroit to Wooster would seem longer than driving from Wooster to Detroit)

Survey Knowledge

The relationship between locations that you directly acquire by learning a map or by repeatedly exploring an environment

Rotation Heuristic

We remember a tilted geographic structure as being more vertical or more horizontal than it really is (e.g. San Diego vs. Reno, Memphis vs. Chicago, Seattle vs. Toronto). Tversky hypothesized that we use heuristics when we represent relative positions in our mental maps. Tversky conducted experiments with mental maps for the San Francisco Bay Area, and 69% of students showed evidence of the rotation heuristic

Alignment Heuristic

We remember geographic structures as being arranged in a straighter line than they really are (e.g. Rome, Italy vs. Philadelphia)