title: Learning geographical information from hypothetical maps.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122, USA. newcombe@temple.edu
authors.forename: Nora S
authors.initials: NS
authors.lastname: Newcombe
authors.forename: Noelle Chiau-Ru
authors.initials: NC
authors.lastname: Chiang
mesh_terms: D005843:Geography; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D014195:Travel