Tour of a Map-Reader’s Brain, Part 1: Location

This is the first in a series of six articles about how spatial reasoning can help children “read” maps, graphs, and geographic texts. Since the late 1900s, neuroscientists and psychologists have used new brain-scanning and eye-tracking technologies to do a lot of research about visual perception and spatial thinking. One key conclusion is that human brains use a number of separate networks to perceive and process different aspects of a visual image (like a map). These operate in parallel, some at the same time, and often without conscious awareness (Zeki 2015; see also Buetti et al. 2016, White et al. 2019, Adamian, Andersen, and Hillyard 2020, Hafri and Firestone 2021). This view of brain function—as a “massively parallel visual brain” rather than a step-by-step image processor—has implications for many aspects of geography education. This first article will look at how the research could influence teaching about the concept of location, the first of the Five Themes of Geography. Location is the identifying mark of geographic inquiry—“if an investigation does not look at the effects of location, it may still be useful research, but it’s not geography!” The basic question about location—“where is it?”—heads the list of geographic questions in the National Geography Standards. Geographers assume that location is causally important—where you are can have a powerful influence on what you are or how you live (whether “you” are a farmer, builder, store owner, pine tree, bald eagle, or soil profile!). Recognizing the importance of location, in turn, is an essential part of dealing with a host of larger issues, such as redlining or roadbuilding at a local scale; power transmission or gerrymandering at an intermediate scale; or trade, climate change, or peacekeeping at a global scale. Given its central role in the geographic perspective, location has often been described as a “basic” or “primitive” idea—the “foundation” for “higher thinking” in geography. Educational standards and sample curricula often list location as one of the topics that should be covered in early grades. Neuroscience research, however, offers a quite different message. The key conclusion of one important article is clearly expressed in its title: “Reference frames for spatial cognition: different brain areas are involved in viewer-, object-, and landmark-centered judgements about object location” (Committeri et al. 2004). Note the date: The early 2000s are when brainscanning became safe enough (and cheap enough) to use in psychological research. Studies in many other labs and universities have come to the same general conclusion: Thinking about location is actually very complicated, because people have to use other kinds of spatial reasoning in order to define a location. These different modes of spatial thinking engage different brain networks (which, in turn, could provide a neurological reason for at least some individual differences among students—more about this in future articles). This new research adds evidence for what some cartographers have maintained for a long time: Reading a map is more than just using a key to decode the meaning of each symbol. The real meaning of a map is in the distances, directions, enclosures, and other spatial relationships among symbols in different locations (Guelke 1977; Liben 2001; Gersmehl 2019). Back in the 20th century, before brain-scanning and eye-tracking technology became widely available for educational research, it was common to ask students to put locations into two categories. A location near a road or landmark was described as relative, but something like latitude and longitude was called absolute. Like the idea of location as a primitive concept, the idea of defining a location as either absolute or relative has been written into the social studies standards in many states. Psychologists and neuroscientists, however, tell us that all mental ideas about location are “inherently relative” (Mou and McNamara 2002). In the quotation at the top of this article, the example chosen to illustrate relative location is longitude, something that many geography standards and teachers cite as an example of absolute location (Mou and McNamara 2002; Anderson and Leinhardt 2002). Think about it. What is longitude? It’s using degrees (an arbitrary measure of angle invented by ancient Babylonians) to measure distance from the Prime Meridian (a line some British astronomers arbitrarily drew through their own observatory). That is, indeed, a great example of relative location.