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

拟议研究的长期目标是继续建立一个关于人们如何表示，推理和更新他们对全球和地方尺度地理知识的证据体系，并调查影响他们在各种类型任务中准确性的各种事情（例如，位置估计;距离估计）。我采用的方法是让人们对各种背景刺激进行位置估计;例如，阿尔伯塔的轮廓图或基于其形状的5边多边形。这些地点要么是点，要么是被标记为城市的点;这让我可以比较感知和长期记忆。作为回应，人们用鼠标将X拖放到他们记得的位置。我假设人们通常对这类问题没有确切的知识，所以他们利用手头的任何信息，加上合理的推理，得出他们的答案。这意味着估计反映了一个人的知识是如何组织的;这反过来又可以帮助开发提高人们准确性的方法。

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.