Tour of a Map Reader’s Brain, Part 5: Patterns, Symmetries, Sequences, and Hierarchies

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Complication: one must read research reports about spatial sequences very carefully. Geographers define a spatial sequence as a series of places along a line that goes generally in one direction, like from south to north or from the bottom to the top of a hill. Someone flying toward the North Pole or walking up the hill would encounter those places in a definite temporal order. Unfortunately, some psychologists use the term to describe any temporal sequence of spatial locations. For example, one common psychological test is to try to remember the locations of a series of lights that flash at scattered positions on an imaginary checkerboard or in random directions from a central point (e.g., at the 2, 6, 11, 7, and 10 on an imaginary clock). These memory tests are logically different from a series of observations along a path, and they seem to engage a different brain network. As a result, the conclusions of some psychologists who study “spatial sequences” do not necessarily apply to a geographic sequence (Dehaene et al. 2015; Konovalov and Krajbich 2018; Wang et al. 2019; Al Roumi et al. 2021).

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Phil Gersmehl

Phil Gersmehl is Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of Minnesota and a consultant for several school districts in Michigan. In collaboration with NGS Geography Alliances, he has led teacher workshops in twenty-eight states, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Korea, and Russia. In the 1990s, Phil was Principal Investigator for the ARGUS and ARGWorld curriculum projects, funded by the National Science Foundation and administered by the Association of American Geographers. After early retirement from the university, he served as co-director of the New York Center for Geographic Learning. The author of three geography textbooks, he has developed distance-learning courses for the University of Minnesota, a pilot TV episode for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, instructional computing projects for IBM, and online interactive resources for the Michigan Council for Social Studies.