Alinda Friedman

Department of Psychology
University of Alberta

http://www.psych.ualberta.ca/~alinda/

Friday, January 29

12:00-2:00 pm

Location Estimates in Real-World Space

I will discuss data from several experiments for which the main goal was

to extend both a metrics and mapping (Brown & Siegler, Psych Review,

1993) and a category adjustment model (Huttenlocher, Hedges, & Duncan,

1991) to global-scale geography by discovering how people represent and

reason within that domain. In earlier work we discovered that

global-scale geographic estimates are biased and that the type of biases

observed implies that representations of global regions (categories) are

also biased. We also found that these same representations are used to

make global-scale distance estimates. The first part of the talk will

briefly describe what the biases are and illustrate them with data from

Canadian, American, and Mexican subjects. The main part of the talk will

describe methods that were used to discover whether the biases obtained

with numeric estimates would be observed when using a spatial response

modality and if so, whether they could be ameliorated with various

perceptual and memorial cues. Seven independent groups estimated the

location of North American cities using both spatial and numeric

response modes and a variety of perceptual and memorial aids, including

allowing people to respond directly on a map. The data provide evidence

that the city and regional levels of representation are independent;

spatial and numeric response modalities affect accuracy differently at

the different levels; biases exist at the regional level, probably have

multiple sources, and are necessarily inherited by the items; and

accurate spatial cues improve estimates primarily by limiting the use of

global landmarks to partition the response space but do not change the

biasing influence of the regions.