Spatial representation and reasoning about global-scale geography

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The long-term goal of the proposed research is to understand how people represent, reason, and update their knowledge about real-world global geography, and to determine what factors influence accuracy in a variety of numeric and non-numeric location estimate tasks. The approach I adopted is to ask people to estimate the locations of cities around the world, after describing the metric they are to use (e.g., that latitudes run from 0 deg at the equator to +/- 90 deg at the poles). I assume that people cannot normally retrieve direct answers to these location questions, so they use whatever information is at hand, together with plausible reasoning processes, to arrive at their estimates. This means that the estimates reflect the way a person's knowledge is organized. For geography, the evidence shows that the representations are categorized into psychological regions and that regions that are quite far apart in reality can be conceptually associated if they are similar along dimensions that are perceived to be relevant to the judgments (e.g., similarities between the climates of the southern U.S. and Mediterranean Europe). Understanding geographical reasoning is of interest for its own sake - because geographical knowledge has general pragmatic importance in both everyday life and in an increasingly global economy, and because geographical facts form a complex, real-world knowledge domain that is learned over the lifespan from a variety of sources and experiences (maps; books; travel; school). In addition, understanding geographical reasoning should shed light on estimation processes in general, including what factors contribute to estimation biases and what attributes of new facts are important for ameliorating such biases. Finally, the findings about geographical reasoning are likely to be informative about spatial reasoning more generally. The work thus promises to be of significance to cognitive scientists, applied researchers interested in geographic information systems, and educators.