Abstract
Mapping your Mental Map
Track: User Presentations - Teaching
Authors: Martin Loidl, Josef Strobl
UNIGIS Salzburg offers a one-year certificate program for professionals from a very broad range of domains. Before students start working with geospatial methods, they are introduced to spatial concepts in general. In this context they learn about mental spatial relations and representations ("Mental Maps"). In order to demonstrate the fuzziness of individual spatial concepts, students are asked to draw well-known, but vaguely defined spatial entities ("Alps", "Middle Europe") on an empty map of Europe. Additionally they are asked to mark their home town with a simple push-pin. The reflection of the own mental map and the comparison of spatial concepts within the group often leads to nice aha-effects.
An analysis of the results of 100+ students shows the diversity of mental concepts of spatial entities. In this talk the results will be presented and the relationship between home town and mental map is going to be discussed.