Spatial representation and reasoning about global-scale geography

全球尺度地理的空间表示和推理

• 批准号: 8264-2006
• 负责人: Friedman, Alinda
• 金额: $ 1.6万
• 依托单位: University of Alberta
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2007-01-01 至 2008-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=365020
• 关键词: Spatial; representation; reasoning; about; global

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.

该研究的长期目标是了解人们如何表达、推理和更新他们对现实世界全球地理的知识，并确定在各种数字和非数字位置估计任务中影响准确性的因素。我采用的方法是让人们在描述他们将要使用的度量标准（例如，纬度从赤道的0度到两极的+/- 90度）之后估计世界各地城市的位置。我假设人们通常无法获得这些位置问题的直接答案，所以他们使用手头的任何信息，加上合理的推理过程，来得出他们的估计。这意味着评估反映了一个人的知识组织方式。就地理而言，有证据表明，表征被分为心理区域，如果现实中相距很远的区域在被认为与判断相关的维度上相似（例如，美国南部和地中海欧洲的气候之间的相似性），则可以在概念上联系起来。理解地理推理本身就很有趣——因为地理知识在日常生活和日益全球化的经济中都具有普遍的实用重要性，因为地理事实形成了一个复杂的、现实世界的知识领域，人们一生中可以从各种来源和经验（地图、书籍、旅行、学校）中学习。此外，了解地理推理应该阐明一般的估计过程，包括导致估计偏差的因素以及新事实的哪些属性对改善这种偏差很重要。最后，关于地理推理的发现可能对更普遍的空间推理提供信息。因此，这项工作对认知科学家、对地理信息系统感兴趣的应用研究人员和教育工作者具有重要意义。