Abstract
This paper reports on a preliminary experiment to determine if gradation on area-class maps facilitates complex map analysis tasks. Twenty-nine subjects were shown either a traditional (crisp) map or one of three graded maps created from the same underlying data, and asked to perform analysis tasks involving two different spatial scales and levels of mental map development. Performance on simple lookup tasks was highest using the crisp map, but each of the more complex tasks was performed with greatest accuracy using a map that depicted gradation between regions. The results suggest that portrayal of gradation on area-class maps may facilitate complex analysis tasks involving global map comprehension and memory of map pattern.
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Kronenfeld, B.J. (2005). Gradation and Map Analysis in Area-Class Maps. In: Cohn, A.G., Mark, D.M. (eds) Spatial Information Theory. COSIT 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3693. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11556114_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11556114_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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