Spatial analysis of cognitive maps

This paper presented an integrated framework for the quantitative analysis of the spatial patterns in cognitive maps by connecting the procedures of spatial analysis to the cognitive mapping process. The author applied this framework to an empirical analysis of the data derived from the students in four Japanese cities dividing the components of distortions into the absolute and the relative ones. The absolute distortion was analyzed by handling the data derived from sketch mapping in Hiroshima and Kanazawa. The cognitive directions in these cities deviated systematically from the actual ones so as to adjust the reference lines, namely the river channels, to cardinal directions; cognitive distances tended to be overestimated. These facts were entirely explained by rotation/alignment heuristics and implicit scaling model. The sketch maps and distance estimates in Tokyo and Sapporo were analyzed in terms of the relative distortion. The cognitive maps for three sample groups in Tokyo commonly showed a transformation of the Yamanote Line to a well-balanced form in a similar manner to the result obtained by Canter and Tagg (1975). This supports the reliability of the method used to extract the cognitive maps. As for the validity of the method, the subjects\u27 self-evaluation of their cognitive maps indicated that sketch mapping is superior in criterion-related validity. The cognitive maps in Sapporo indicated a somewhat different tendency in the methods for extracting them: the sketch maps showed a striking similarity with the actual map, but the configurations recovered from distance estimates were closely related to the route-distance space. This tendency implies a non-Euclidean property of the cognitive map, which was also validated by the stress values of MDS being lowest for the city-block metric among three Minkowskian metrics. Another component of errors in cognitive maps, called fuzziness, was measured by standard deviational ellipses for each locations. The fuzziness of locational cognition was greater in peripheral places than in central ones within the study area. The information-processing model provided us with an comprehensive explanatory framework for these spatial patterns in cognitive maps. Although it gave a satisfactory explanation of the patterns of distortions, those of fuzziness were hard to explain