Exploring the cognitive load of expert and novice map users using EEG and eye tracking

The main objective of this research is to explore the cognitive processes of expert and novice map users during the retrieval of map-related information, within varying difficulty levels (i.e., easy, moderate, hard), by using eye tracking and electroencephalogram (EEG). In this context, we present a spatial memory experiment consisting of a large number of stimuli to study the effect of task difficulty on map users' behavior through cognitive load measurements. Next to the reaction time and success rate, we used fixation and saccade related eye tracking metrics (i.e., average fixation duration, the number of fixations per second, saccade amplitude and saccade velocity), and EEG power spectrum (i.e., event-related changes in alpha and theta frequency bands) to identify the cognitive load. While fixation metrics indicated no statistically significant difference between experts and novices, saccade metrics proved the otherwise. EEG power spectral density analysis, on the other side, suggested an increase in theta (i.e., event-related synchronization) and a decrease in alpha (except moderate tasks) (i.e., event-related desynchronization) at all difficulty levels of the task for both experts and novices, which is an indicator of cognitive load. Although no significant difference emerged between two groups, we found a significant difference in their overall performances when the participants were classified as good and relatively bad learners. Triangulating EEG results with the recorded eye tracking data and the qualitative analysis of focus maps indeed provided a detailed insight on the differences of the individuals' cognitive processes during this spatial memory task

Towards compulsive geographies

This paper presents a spatial imagining of compulsivity. Deconstructing its medicalised conceptualisation and its rendition through the diagnostic system, the paper offers a performative analysis of compulsive body–world formation. It does so by introducing compulsivity as urging the performance of acts that are unwanted, purposeless, and meaningless, and that nevertheless enlace the corporeal with and through the extracorporeal on unchosen terms. This analysis of compulsions not only develops the dimension of urgency to nonrepresentational theory in cultural geography. It also develops the critical performative understanding of medicalised phenomena in disability and health geography by considering compulsivity as a more-than-human condition. Indeed, reporting on interviews, participant observations, and mobile eye-tracking sessions with 15 people diagnosed with Tourette syndrome, compulsions seem to emerge from particularly volatile compositions of bodies, objects and spaces. The paper then conceives of compulsivity as articulating the material sensibilities emerging with the body’s unfolding situation, and propels it beyond the diagnosable in a broader humanity engaging in material interactions that are felt, rather than known. In addition to a geography of compulsivity, a geographical rendering and ontological centring of compulsions creates a compulsive geography. Ultimately, it situates geographical analysis as crucial to understanding this medicalised performance and as potentially generative of therapeutic outcomes

Cognitive maps: what are they and why study them?

It is often implicitly assumed by researchers that their readers understand what cognitive map and cognitive mapping are, and their justification for study. This paper differs in this respect by explaining explicitly the 'what' and 'why' questions often asked, demonstrating cognitive mapping's multidisciplinary research worth. First, it examines questions concerning what cognitive maps are, the confusion inherent from the use of the term 'map', and the usage and reasons for alternative expressions. Second, it examines the theoretical applications or conceptual research, concerning cognitive maps role in the influencing and explaining spatial behaviour; spatial choice and decision making; wayiinding and orientation; and the cognitive maps utility and role as a mnemonic and metaphorical devise; a shaper of world and local attitudes and perspectives; and for creating and coping with imaginary worlds. Third, it discusses cognitive mapping's practical and applied worth, concerning the planning of suitable living environments; advertising; crime solving; search and rescue, geographical educational issues, cartography and remote sensing; and in the designing and understanding computer interfaces and databases, especially Geographical Information Systems (GISs)

Cognitive maps: what are they and why study them?

It is often implicitly assumed by researchers that their readers understand what cognitive map and cognitive mapping are, and their justification for study. This paper differs in this respect by explaining explicitly the 'what' and 'why' questions often asked, demonstrating cognitive mapping's multidisciplinary research worth. First, it examines questions concerning what cognitive maps are, the confusion inherent from the use of the term 'map', and the usage and reasons for alternative expressions. Second, it examines the theoretical applications or conceptual research, concerning cognitive maps role in the influencing and explaining spatial behaviour; spatial choice and decision making; wayiinding and orientation; and the cognitive maps utility and role as a mnemonic and metaphorical devise; a shaper of world and local attitudes and perspectives; and for creating and coping with imaginary worlds. Third, it discusses cognitive mapping's practical and applied worth, concerning the planning of suitable living environments; advertising; crime solving; search and rescue, geographical educational issues, cartography and remote sensing; and in the designing and understanding computer interfaces and databases, especially Geographical Information Systems (GISs)

LOCATIVE MEDIA, AUGMENTED REALITIES AND THE ORDINARY AMERICAN LANDSCAPE

This dissertation investigates the role of annotative locative media in mediating experiences of place. The overarching impetus motivating this research is the need to bring to bear the theoretical and substantive concerns of cultural landscape studies on the development of a methodological framework for interrogating the ways in which annotative locative media reconfigure experiences of urban landscapes. I take as my empirical cases i) Google Maps with its associated Street View and locational placemark interface, and ii) Layar, an augmented reality platform combining digital mapping and real-time locational augmentation. In the spirit of landscape studies’ longstanding and renewed interest in what may be termed “ordinary” residential landscapes, and reflecting the increasing imbrication of locative media technologies in everyday lives, the empirical research is based in Kenwick, a middleclass, urban residential neighborhood in Lexington, Kentucky. Overall, I present an argument about the need to consider the digital, code (i.e. software), and specifically locative media, in the intellectual context of critical geographies in general and cultural landscape studies in particular

Digital sketch maps and eye tracking statistics as instruments to obtain insights into spatial cognition

This paper explores map users' cognitive processes in learning, acquiring and remembering information presented via screen maps. In this context, we conducted a mixed-methods user experiment employing digital sketch maps and eye tracking. On the one hand, the performance of the participants was assessed based on the order with which the objects were drawn and the influence of visual variables (e.g. presence & location, size, shape, color). On the other hand, trial durations and eye tracking statistics such as average duration of fixations, and number of fixations per seconds were compared. Moreover, selected AoIs (Area of Interests) were explored to gain a deeper insight on visual behavior of map users. Depending on the normality of the data, we used either two-way ANOVA or Mann-Whitney U test to inspect the significance of the results. Based on the evaluation of the drawing order, we observed that experts and males drew roads first whereas; novices and females focused more on hydrographic object. According to the assessment of drawn elements, no significant differences emerged between neither experts and novices, nor females and males for the retrieval of spatial information presented on 2D maps with a simple design and content. The differences in trial durations between novices and experts were not statistically significant while both studying and drawing. Similarly, no significant difference occurred between female and male participants for either studying or drawing. Eye tracking metrics also supported these findings. For average duration of fixation, there was found no significant difference between experts and novices, as well as between females and males. Similarly, no significant differences were found for the mean number of fixation

Outside the Frame: Mapping and Urban Space in the United States, c. 1920-2014

In this thesis, I will focus on the way in which maps have developed and been used in or by the United States, specifically government and academic institutions, in the past century to create, control, and shape urban space. I will make use of formal analysis and historical context to examine three case studies in which “conventional” maps, meaning institutional (namely, government and academic) cartography, have been used, and, it will be argued, misused, to selectively include and exclude information and collectively shape our environment. Additionally, this thesis will follow chronologically alongside the simultaneous development and refinement of mapping technologies, focusing on how these advancements in technology were fueled by, and subsequently fed into, certain understandings of the production of space. In order, the case studies I examine are the Home Owners\u27 Loan Corporation (HOLC) and Federal Housing Association (FHA) redlining maps of Philadelphia, military mappings and the development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and the Million-Dollar Blocks project by Columbia\u27s Spatial Information Design Lab. I am investigating what – meaning what people, narratives, and experiences – is left outside of the frame of the map and to what effect. Keywords: mapping, critical cartography, GIS, Philadelphia, incarceration, urban space

(Re)Placing America: Cold War Mapping and the Mediation of International Space

The United States emerged from World War II as an undeniably global power, and as the Cold War unfolded, America faced decisions about where to place and display its power on the globe. The Cold War was a battle between two ideologies and competing world systems, both of which were vying for space and had the tools and technologies to control those spaces. Maps became a central vehicle for the testing of these new boundaries. Mapping projects and programs emerged from a variety of popular cartographers, foreign policy strategists, defense leaders, Congressional representatives, scientists, oppositional movements, labor unions, educational publishers, even everyday citizens. As each of these sources confirms, the scope of American commitments had expanded considerably; to account for this expansion, a cartographic impulse underwrote the continually evolving Cold War, and the tensions of art and science, realism and idealism, and space and place inherent in this impulse helped form the fault lines of the conflict. (Re)Placing America looks largely at the ways that cartography adapted to such changes and tensions in the second half of the twentieth century, and how the United States marshaled the practice of mapping in a variety of ways to account for the shift to internationalism. This dissertation explores how cartography mediated visions of space, and particularly, how it defined America's place within those spaces. Treating cartography as a complex rhetorical process of production, display, and circulation, the five chapters cover major geopolitical thematics, and the responding evolution of maps, from World War II until the Cold War's end in the early 1990s. Some of these driving themes include the "air-age" expansion of visual perspectives and strategic potential in journalistic maps; the appropriation of cartography as a medium for intelligence and national security objectives; the marshaling of maps as evidential weapons against the Soviet Union in diplomatic exchanges, Congressional reports, and government-sponsored propaganda; the shifts from East/West antagonisms to North/South ones as cartography was drafted into the modernization efforts of the U.S. in mapping the Third World; and the Defense Department's use of maps to argue for nuclear deterrence, while protest groups made radical cartographic challenges to these practices of state power. (Re)Placing America reads closely the maps of the forty-years-plus conflict and considers the complexity of their internal codes (in colors, shapes, icons, etc.), while also reaching out externally to the intersecting interests and visions of the cartographic producers and the Cold War contexts in which they emerged. The project seeks out and explores particular nodal points and thematics where maps consolidated and shaped changing shifts in perception, where cartographic fragments cohered around the defining moments, but also sometimes in the everyday politics of the Cold War. Ultimately, this project offers four conclusions about and conduct and operation of American mapping during the complex, ideologically charged time of the Cold War. First, the function of the map to both "fix" and "unfix" particular perceptions of the world is relevant to assessing how America sought to stabilize its place in a rapidly changing world. Second, the internationalism of the Cold War was bound up in the capacities for cartography to document and adapt to it. Third, the humanistic notion of a geographical imagination is central to understanding why particular Cold War agents and institutions continually drew on cartography to represent their interests. Finally, combining an ideological approach to reading maps as articulators of contextual tensions and historical ideas with an instrumental approach to maps as material, strategic documents can best help to situate cartography as an ongoing process of production, circulation, and display