People’s global-scale cognitive map versus their personal characteristics: a worldwide study

ABSTRACT

In recent years, there has been a rising awareness about the relevance of spatial ability and integrating spatial information into educational curricula. It is now considered essential to problem-solving and understanding a variety of natural and cultural phenomena. To analyze people’s global-scale cognitive map and which factors influence it, a short playful test was developed that allowed participants to estimate the real land area of certain countries, regions, and continents. These estimates are analyzed to define how accurately the size of countries and continents is perceived. The results show that country of residence does not significantly affect people’s spatial knowledge. However, gender, migration background, and familiarity with maps have a significant impact.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitive map
• education
• residency
• gender
• spatial learning
• map projection

Acknowledgments

This research has benefitted from a statistical consultation with Ghent University FIRE (Fostering Innovative Research based on Evidence).

Data availability

Data related to this article are available at: Lapon, Lieselot, 2020, “Replication Data for: People’s global-scale cognitive map versus their personal characteristics: a worldwide study”, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/OE7INC, Harvard Dataverse.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Special Research Funding of Ghent University (BOF) under Grant ID [BOF.24J.2015.0018.01].