Cognitive Maps And Systemic Distortion

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Cognitive maps refer to mental constructs that resemble actual maps. Just like visual maps, cognitive maps contain landmarks, routes, line-like elements and spatial relations. However, while creating cognitive maps, people try to remember knowledge from the actual environment and in the process, they make systemic errors. This implies that the cognitive representation of the maps and the actual knowledge are systemically distorted. While estimating spatial distance on cognitive maps, factors related to mental perceptions and behavior biases such as number of intervening cities, category membership, landmarks and attitudes can produce systemic distortions.
According to Matlin (2013), while creating mental maps, distance estimates are influenced by intervening cities or the number of cities found in the map. When there are no intervening cities, the estimated distances in the cognitive maps are shorter than the actual distance on the represented map. If there are a number of cities within the map, then the estimated spatial distance in the cognitive map tends to be longer than the actual distance on the …show more content…
While estimating distances between pairs of locations, people tend to create categories than in turn affect distance estimation. For instance, when estimating distance between two sets of locations in a cognitive map, people tend to shift the location of places that belong to the same category. For example, the distance between two restaurants is considered to be shorter than the distance between a restaurant and a government building. In addition, while choosing a vacation home, people tend to prefer to select a home that is far away from their home state. Alternatively, if the chosen vacation home is located in an earthquake zone, people prefer selecting a vacation home in a different state; but, equally far from home and probably in the same state as the
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