ROTATION, ORIENTATION, AND COGNITIVE MAPPING

Tversky (1981) has argued that when a map has a natural orientation th at does not correspond to that of its frame of reference, conditions a re ideal for invoking the heuristic of rotation in its representation as a cognitive map. In the two studies reported here, such a situation was exploited with respect to judgment of orientation to cities withi n Israel. In both Experiments 1 and 2, which employed a recall-and-pro duction method, a 15-degrees counter-clockwise rotation was predicted and found in orientation judgments.