Learning geographical information from hypothetical maps.
People show biases or distortions in their geographical judgments, such as mistakenly judging Rome to be south of Chicago (the Chicago-Rome illusion). These errors may derive from either perceptual heuristics or categorical organization. However, previous work on geographic knowledge has generally examined people's judgments of real-world locations for which learning history is unknown. This article reports experiments on the learning of hypothetical geographical spaces, in which participants acquired information in a fashion designed to control real-world factors, such as variable travel experiences or stereotypes about other countries, as well as to mimic initial encounters with locations through reading or conventional school-based geography education. Five experiments combine to suggest that biases in judgment based on learning of this kind are different in key regards from those seen with real-world geography and may be based more on the use of perceptual heuristics than on categorical organization.
Newcombe
Nora S
NS
Department of Psychology, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122, USA. newcombe@temple.edu
Chiang
Noelle Chiau-Ru
NC
D005843:Geography; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D014195:Travel