Spatial representation and reasoning about global-scale geography

拟议研究的长期目标是了解人们如何表示，推理和更新他们对现实世界的全球地理知识，并确定哪些因素影响各种数字和非数字位置估计任务的准确性。我采用的方法是让人们在描述他们要使用的度量标准（例如，纬度从赤道的0度到两极的+/-90度）。我假设人们通常无法直接获得这些位置问题的答案，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。这意味着估计值反映了一个人的知识是如何组织的。对于地理，证据表明，表征被分类为心理区域，并且如果沿着被认为与判断相关的维度上相似，则现实中相距很远的区域可以在概念上相关联（例如，美国南部和地中海欧洲气候之间的相似性）。理解地理推理本身就很有意义，因为地理知识在日常生活和日益全球化的经济中具有普遍的实用重要性，而且地理事实形成了一个复杂的现实世界的知识领域，在生命周期中从各种来源和经验（地图，书籍，旅行，学校）中学习。此外，理解地理推理应该有助于了解一般的估计过程，包括哪些因素导致估计偏差，以及新事实的哪些属性对于改善这种偏差很重要。最后，关于地理推理的研究结果可能是关于空间推理更普遍的信息。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。

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.