What makes spatial perspective unique

When students use a GIS to create their own maps, they can begin to understand how different maps can be created from the same data, depending on what is selected to be shown on the map. They might create a map that is very different to that of their peers.

Geospatial technologies, such as Google Earth and GIS, are examples of high-tech systems that can help students become spatially literate. Refer to Geospatial technologies including GIS.

Manipulating digital maps allows you to change them in many different ways. Developing spatial thinking is taking on new layers of complexity as technology is literally changing the shape of maps as we know them. He has spent over 25 years drawing what he describes as strangely shaped maps. Browse www. Worldmapper was developed in and relaunched in There are now nearly maps to explore and they give powerful visual impact to current patterns in development. For more information on what cookies are and how you can manage and remove them click here.

Spatial thinking. Revisit the support sheet on The concepts of place, space and scale and focus on the analysis of space set out here. Students need to be able to: understand and interpret maps and other geographic representations and know what a map can — and cannot — show describe and analyse spatial patterns of people, places, and environments collect and display information on maps, graphs, and diagrams make maps — from hand-drawn sketch maps to more complex representations using a range of appropriate technologies such as GIS.

By understanding these themes, students will be equipped with tools that provide important problem-solving and decision-making skills in geography Reading for trainee teachers and NQTs Biddulph, M. You should teach students about: the ways that maps can be constructed to transmit meaning representations at different scales the interpretation of spatial distributions economic, human, physical the selection of data and how it is mapped. Do the other five feature at all? Is there a progression in the development of these skills in the KS3 curriculum of your school?

Do the teachers in your school see an important role for GIS in developing spatial thinking skills? Refer to Geospatial technologies including GIS Search Google Images for 'world maps' and you will be presented with a wide-ranging selection of maps that represent the world. Many of these images will have been manipulated for a purpose. Save a collection of these images and use them with your students to help develop their critical map literacy.

Please respect copyright law and do not distribute these images outside your classroom unless permission is expressly given on the websites where you obtained them. Modeling data supplies a method for asking spatial questions that explore the relationships between different factors.

With the cartographic tools in GIS, this information can be displayed in a manner that communicates in a clear and compelling fashion not only to decision makers but also to the public. More powerful systems and the migration to new computing platforms in the last decade have also contributed to the expansion of GIS and its incorporation into decision-support systems. Enterprise technology and interenterprise systems now manage more information, support more applications, and provide more rapid access to information.

The ascent of server GIS has generated applications that influence decision making from the organizational to the individual level: the growth of mashups; the popularity of consumer information delivered as a map on a phone; the availability of substantial prepackaged datasets such as the Esri Data Appliance; and the delivery of globes, maps, and services by ArcGIS Online. A team at the Woods Hole Research Center is exploring the connection between the carbon cycle and land cover through the creation of the National Biomass and Carbon Dataset for the year The need to manage water resources in a manner that ensures adequate freshwater supplies is a worldwide concern.

The authors describe how a land-use decision-making system was made more accessible, reliable, and flexible by incorporating ArcGIS and ModelBuilder into the process. In each case, GIS allows decision makers to consider not only economic and political factors but also ecological and cultural ones.

For example, it is difficult to discern the relationships between factors such as population density and freshwater supplies by just looking at a table. However, thematically mapping this data can make relationships apparent. Viewed in a geographic framework, dependencies and interactions are more apparent and the trade-offs between a variety of possible solutions can be modeled and evaluated.

GIS brings both depth and scope to the decision-making process. In accepting the Making a Difference Award at this year's Esri International User Conference, United States Department of the Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne described a future in which the decision-making process benefits from the geographic approach. However, the present study did not replicate the interaction of condition and sex observed by Tarampi et al. Specifically, in this study both men and women had better performance when the directional cue was an avatar.

This may be because men in the Tarampi et al. In contrast, the more difficult VR task, which involved a change of viewing angle to relate the view of the array to the view of the answer circle, may have been more challenging for men, so that there was more room for improvement in their performance due to the avatar and chair directional cues. More research is necessary to examine the multitude of factors that could influence performance on perspective-taking tasks.

Future research should examine other non-human directional cues, particularly those that we interact with e. Future studies should also consider ambiguously or incorrectly oriented human figures to further isolate agentive versus directional components that may influence performance. For example, the array could include a human figure that always faces forward, therefore not facing any of the objects and not changing its facing direction between trials.

The present experiments provide insights about the cognitive processes that underlie perspective-taking ability, particularly in environments that contain social and directional cues.

Our research suggests that people perform perspective-taking tasks primarily using a mental simulation strategy in which they imagine themselves in the array.

Directional cues that facilitate this mental simulation may support enhanced performance, regardless of whether they are agents or objects with which we can imagine interacting. Given large individual differences in perspective taking, future research should build upon these insights to guide the development of training strategies for perspective taking and other spatial abilities.

This research was supported by a grant to M. The Money Road map test was used, which is another test of perspective taking, and had moderate correlations with the VR and paper versions of the SOT. The pattern and significance of the results do not change if we base the analysis on the average error for completed trials only.

Analyses including all participants do not change direction or significance of any effects. Allen, G. Kirasic, S. Dobson, R. Beck Predicting environmental learning from spatial abilities: An indirect route, Intelligence , 22, Article Google Scholar.

Baron-Cohen, S. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders , 31 1 , Article PubMed Google Scholar. Barsalou, L. Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology , 59 , Clements-Stephens, A.

The role of potential agents in making spatial perspective taking social. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience , 7 , Clinton, J. Gaining perspective on spatial perspective taking.

Journal of Cognitive Psychology , 30 1 , Costantini, M. How your hand drives my eyes. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience , 9 5 , De Freitas, E. Diagram, gesture, agency: Theorizing embodiment in the mathematics classroom. Educational Studies in Mathematics , 80 , Epley, N.

Perspective taking in children and adults: Equivalent egocentrism but differential correction. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology , 40 6 , Fields, A. Shelton Individual skill differences and large-scale environmental learning, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32, — PubMed Google Scholar.

Flavell, J. Young children's knowledge about visual perception: Further evidence for the Level 1—Level 2 distinction. Developmental Psychology, 17 1 , Galinsky, A. Perspective-taking and self-other overlap: Fostering social bonds and facilitating social coordination.

Gardner, M. Strategy modulates spatial perspective-taking: evidence for dissociable disembodied and embodied routes. Frontiers in human neuroscience , 7 , Hegarty, M. Mental animation: Inferring motion from static displays of mechanical systems. Mechanical reasoning by mental simulation. Trends in cognitive sciences , 8 6 , A dissociation between mental rotation and perspective-taking spatial abilities. Intelligence , 32 2 , Huttenlocher, J.

Mental rotation and the perspective problem. Cognitive Psychology , 4 2 , The coding and transformation of spatial information. Cognitive Psychology , 11 3 , JASP Team. JASP Version 0. Kessler, K. The embodied nature of spatial perspective taking: embodied transformation versus sensorimotor interference.

Cognition , 1 , Kozhevnikov, M. A dissociation between object manipulation spatial ability and spatial orientation ability. May, M. Imaginal perspective switches in remembered environments: Transformation versus interference accounts. Cognitive Psychology , 48 2 , Money, J. A standardized road-map test of direction sense: Manual.

Johns Hopkins Press. Newcombe, N. The development of spatial perspective taking. Early education for spatial intelligence: Why, what, and how. Mind, Brain, and Education , 4 3 , Niedenthal, P. Embodiment in attitudes, social perception, and emotion. Personality and social psychology review , 9 3 , Embodied cognition as grounding for situatedness and context in mathematics education. Educational studies in mathematics , 39 , Piaget, J. The coordination of perspectives. Google Scholar.

Presson, C. Updating after rotational and translational body movements: Coordinate structure of perspective space. Perception , 23 12 , Rieser, J. Access to knowledge of spatial structure at novel points of observation. Samson, D. Seeing it their way: evidence for rapid and involuntary computation of what other people see.

Schinazi, V. Sebanz, N. Representing others' actions: just like one's own? Cognition , 88 3 , BB Shelton, A. Should social savvy equal good spatial skills? The interaction of social skills with spatial perspective taking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General , 2 , Sholl, M. The relation of sex and sense of direction to spatial orientation in an unfamiliar environment.

Journal of Environmental Psychology , 20 1 , Surtees, A. The use of embodied self-rotation for visual and spatial perspective-taking. Tarampi, M. A tale of two types of perspective taking: Sex differences in spatial ability. Psychological Science , 27 11 , Tversky, B. Embodied and disembodied cognition: Spatial perspective-taking. Weisberg, S. Zwickel, J. Agency attribution and visuospatial perspective taking.

Download references. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Correspondence to Peri Gunalp. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Other students have reported a range of strategies that they used to do these tasks.