cognitive maps Flashcards
Cognitive Map
mental representation of our environment.
Has ecological validity (neighborhoods, cities, countries and real world settings)
Spatial cognition
our thoughts about spatial issues, cognitive maps, remembering the world we navigate, keeping track of objects in a spatial array.
survey knowledge
the relationship among locations that you directly acquire by learning a map or by repeatedly exploring an environment
GPS makes this harder to form
Orientation of map
judgements are easier when your mental map and the physical map have matching orientations.
Thorndyke (1981) – Number of Intervening Cities
Ps studied map of hypothetical region until they could reproduce it; then estimated the distance between specified pairs of cities.
IV: 0, 1, 2, or 3 other cities along the route between two cities.
Result: Roads with more turns and cities in between seemed longer.
Semantic categories
semantic factors influence distance estimates for specific locations.
ex: campus buildings versus off campus buildings
Hirtle and Mascolo (1986)
Learn hypothetical map of a town, estimate distance between pairs of locations
Result: Tend to shift closer location to sites in the same semantic cluster.
ex: DIA + State Hall vs. State Hall + Student Center
Landmark effect
general tendency to provide shorter estimates when traveling to a landmark, rather than a non-landmark.
ex: distance from Detroit to Toledo feels longer than the distance from Toledo to Detroit.
Stevens and Coupe (1978)
East + West, North + South judgements of pairs of cities.
Tversky
We use heuristics when we represent relative positions in our mental maps.
Rotation Heuristic
We remember a tilted geographic structure as being either more vertical or more horizontal than it really is.
ex: Cali/Nevada, US/Canada
Alignment Heuristic
We remember geographic structures as being arranged in a straighter line than they really are.
Tversky (1981)
Mental maps for San Francisco Bay area.
69% of students used rotation heuristic. Showed a consistent tendency to use the alignment heuristic for northern cities in North America compared to Southern cities in Europe.
Cognitive maps and Relative Position
Heuristics make sense but can cause us to miss important details. Fail to pay attention to bottom-up information.
Ex:
Reno > San Diego = Rotational
Memphis > Chicago = Rotational
Seattle > Toronto = Rotational
Iome > Philadelphia = Alignment
