Bartram – COMPREHENDING SPATIAL INFORMATION 1980

Description

Bartram investigated how four presentation modes—conventional road map, schematic map, sequential lists of stops, and alphabetical lists—affect comprehension of bus-route information. Thirty-two undergraduates solved route-finding problems requiring two to four buses while location and total solution times were recorded. Results showed maps produced faster solutions than lists, with the schematic map yielding the best performance. Task complexity (more transfers) degraded performance for list formats—especially alphabetical lists—but had little effect for maps. Subjects using lists tended to apply deductive, memory-heavy strategies rather than forming spatial state representations, explaining poor performance on complex problems. The road map allowed locating specific addresses and landmarks (an advantage over schematic maps), but required more spatial recoding. Bartram concludes people internally represent place relations as spatial networks, so representations that explicitly show spatial relations (ideally a schematized map that preserves useful landmarks) are most compatible and effective for route-finding, particularly as system complexity increases.