The Space of Navigation
Effects of the different elements such as frame of reference (the hierarchical encoding example) were all very interesting. What would be interesting to know though if certain of these elements are more dominant at certain scales. If we could identify that everyone thought at the provincial scale in the hierarchical example’s way, then we could develop a framework on how to communicate and teach people geographic information.
One problem I had with the article though, was that it was very much from a cog. sci. (or similar) approach, rather than a geography/geospatial view. What effect do the statements on our mental representations of space have on how we should do things in the future? Are the different biases observed in the different studies necessarily a bad thing? Should we shape our data output, such as local maps, to meet these methods of storing information in the brain, or should we stick to something that is as ‘accurate’ to being a representation of the ground surface as possible? At the very least, more knowledge on how humans perceive their environment should help us determine what we are doing wrong when presenting geographic information, an area that would have been interesting to see in this article.
-Peck