Understanding Spatial Autocorrelation: An Everyday Metaphor and Additional New Interpretations

An enumeration of spatial autocorrelation’s (SA’s) polyvalent forms occurred nearly three decades ago. Attempts to conceive and disseminate a clearer explanation of it employ metaphors seeking to better relate SA to a student’s or spatial scientist’s personal knowledge databank. However, not one of these uses the jigsaw puzzle metaphor appearing in this paper, which exploits an analogy between concrete visual content organization and abstract map patterns of attributes. It not only makes SA easier to understand, which furnishes a useful pedagogic tool for teaching novices and others about it, but also discloses that many georeferenced data should contain a positive–negative SA mixture. Empirical examples corroborate this mixture’s existence, as well as the tendency for marked positive SA to characterize remotely sensed and moderate (net) positive SA to characterize socio-economic/demographic, georeferenced data.