SEMANTIC AND VISUAL FACTORS AFFECTING THE REPRESENTATION OF MAP INFORMATION

In past research evidence has been found for both mental imagery and p ropositional hierarchies in subjects' map representations. How the vis ual and semantic factors associated with maps influence the use of one form of representation or another was the subject of the study report ed here. Subjects were required to make relational judgments about cit y pairs. The results of experiment 1 indicated that superordinate rela tionships (the relationship of the counties of which the cities were m embers) affected only the most difficult perceptual judgments, but aff ected all judgments made from memory. Experiment 2 was done to determi ne the extent to which these findings were attributable to perceptual distortions rather than propositionally stored rules. Results of exper iment 3 showed the degree of perceptual distinction necessary for prop ositional rules to have no significant influence on relational judgmen ts.