Preliminary analysis of multi-scale spatial cognition and its longitudinal changes in sketch maps of high school students

Whereas numerous studies have been done on spatial cognition using hand-drawn maps, little is known about how different these maps are between spatial scales. In particular, the need for multi-scale spatial knowledge has been growing as the progress of globalization in economy and politics. In addition, few attempts have been done to capture temporal change of spatial cognition on different scales. Hence, I attempted to analyze the relationship between hand-drawn maps showing the large range of world maps and the hand-drawn small range maps involved in school commuter route maps. A questionnaire survey was conducted to 74 high school students to collect hand-drawn maps. The results of the analysis revealed that when drawing world maps, focus was placed on “correctness of form”, whereas when drawing maps for school commuter routes, “correctness of orientation” was emphasized. World maps are drawn “in the order of all to part”, whereas for school commuter routes, the majority of the students drew “in the order of part to all”. Whereas with world maps, many of the students “draw while imagining the maps in an atlas”, maps for school commuter routes are drawn by reproducing the “feeling of when you are walking”