Many geographers, psychologists, and other cognitive scientists have conducted research on the ways that people acquire knowledge about spatial patterns and relationships. Researchers disagree about the process by which people gain knowledge of more complex spatial principles like distance, connectivity, regional structure, and spatial stratification. Some contend that this type of knowledge is acquired through aggregation of insights gained through single experiences. Others argue that such knowledge is more quickly and completely obtained through direct exposure to media like maps that directly present spatial information in configurational formats. This project will test the validity of these two contentions through a set of comparative experiments. Subjects will be separated into two groups. People in one group will be shown series of slides that represent ground-level views along routes that those individuals might travel. People in the other group will be shown maps covering the same routes. Members of both groups will be asked to conduct a series of tasks that test their abilities to recognize spatial patterns and distributions, to reconstruct routes, to recognize the proximity of locations, and to identify regional and hierarchical relationships. The accuracy and speed of answers will be measured and tested to determine whether those who acquire information through the "bottoms up" approach replicated by viewing the slides retain gain as much configurational knowledge as those who have the "birdseye" perspectives from viewing maps. This project will directly test hypotheses about the efficacy of different means of obtaining spatial information. The results of these experiments will significantly enhance our knowledge of how people form spatial understandings, of why they behave as they do in different spatial contexts, and how geographic education might be altered to become more effective.
