Spatial cognition: estimating locations and category boundaries in real-world geography and artificial spaces

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The long-term goal of the proposed research is to continue to establish a body of evidence about how people represent, reason , and update their knowledge about global- and local-scale geography, and to investigate the kinds of things that affect their accuracy in a variety of types of tasks (e.g., location estimates; distance estimates). The approach I adopted is to have people make location estimates on various sorts of background stimuli; for example, either an outline map of Alberta or a 5-sided polygon that is based on its shape. The locations are either just dots or dots that have been labeled as a city; this allows me to compare perception and long-term memory. To respond, people drag and drop Xs with a computer mouse to the locations they remember. I assume that people do not usually have exact knowledge about these sorts of questions, so they use whatever information is at hand, together with plausible reasoning, to arrive at their answers. This means that the estimates reflect the way a person's knowledge is organized; which, in turn, can help develop the means to improve people's accuracy.