Why I Want to Attend. I have enjoyed the two previous NCGIA/Varenius workshops that I have attended. The interdisciplinary perspectives, the lively conversation, and the break-out sessions have combined to make these workshops very informative and useful. I have learned a great deal from the interaction both of members of my own discipline of psychology and with scholars from other disciplines. In addition, I am particularly interested in the themes of this workshop. I believe that spatial cognition is an inherently dynamic process, but there has been relatively little research on this topic. I look forward to participating in the development of a research agenda that will address this topic. I also believe that I could contribute to the conference, primarily by bringing a developmental perspective to the discussions.

Perspective on the Issues of the Conference. I am a developmental psychologist, and my research focuses on the development of spatial cognition, particularly young children’s understanding and use of maps and other symbolic representations of space. One issue that I have studied that is relevant to the themes of the conference concerns the effects of altering how young children conceive of a set of spatial locations on their ability to use a map of the locations. Since the time of the Gestaltists, psychologists have stressed that the interpretation of spatial stimuli is not merely a process of keeping track of individual locations. Instead, people often interpret individual locations as part of an organized or meaningful structure. A classic example is the constellations; ancient navigators organized and described the locations of sets of stars into meaningful patterns. I have been investigating organizing information as a meaningful pattern facilitates children's use of spatial correspondences between maps and referent spaces.

A key advantage of construing locations in terms of meaningful figures is that we can interpret, encode, or describe individual locations in terms of relations between the parts and the whole of the figure. We may say, for example, that a particular star is located within the handle of the Big Dipper, or that a particular city is located in the Panhandle of Texas. This knowledge could facilitate substantially the process of establishing correspondences between locations on small-scale representations and in the represented space. For example, knowing that a specific star is located within a particular part of a constellation can facilitate the process of searching for that star in the evening sky. The meaningful pattern constrains substantially the area through which we must search for the correct star and hence eliminates what could be a tedious and inefficient process of looking for correspondences on the basis of more local relations, such as the knowledge that the target is to the left of several other stars. In addition, organizing locations into meaningful patterns can facilitate memory by creating redundancies and facilitating hierarchical organization. A specific landmark can be encoded or recalled both in terms of spatial relations to other landmarks (e.g., one star is to the right of another) and in terms of a recognizable structure or parts of the structure (e.g., one star is at the edge of Orion's Belt).

I have conducted studies to investigate the development of the ability to interpret sets of locations in terms of higher-order or meaningful patterns. These studies suggest that learning to interpret a set of locations as embedded within an overall structure facilitates children’s use of maps to solve search tasks. Children (ages 4 and 5) were asked to use a simple map to find a hidden toy. The 27 hiding locations were paper coasters that were distributed across a 10 ft by 10 ft piece of felt. On each trial, a sticker was hidden under one of the coasters, and the experimenter showed the child the location on a map that represented the hidden location. As shown in Figure 1, the locations were arranged so that they could be construed as forming a meaningful pattern, the outline of a dog. However, only one-half of the children (ages 4 and 5) were informed that the pattern could be interpreted in this way. These children (the dog-informed group) saw a map on which the individual locations were connected with lines; this highlighted the outline of the dog. The remaining children formed a control group; they saw a map that showed the locations of the 27 coasters, but there were no lines to highlight the dog pattern. The children (particularly the five-year-olds) who were informed of the dog pattern performed almost 40 % better than the control group did. This result suggests that by age 5, young children can take advantage of the fact that maps can highlight alternate construals of a set of spatial locations.

Figure 1. The two displays that children saw.

Taken together, these results suggest that learning to think about spatial configurations in alternate ways may be an important aspect of the development of spatial cognition. The results may also be relevant to the themes of the workshop because they highlight the importance of altering how people perceive and think about spatial locations. Dynamic or animated representations of spatial locations have the potential to highlight alternate construals of locations, just as adding lines altered how young children saw the dots on the map. I am interested in exploring these issues further, both on maps and in other types of graphic displays, such as computer animations.