Learning from cartograms: The effects of region familiarity

Value-by-area maps, or cartograms, are a curiosity-provoking method of depicting geographically related data. The use of cartograms for learning such data involves a learner's familiarity with the region depicted and the distortion of true, earth-centered scale. To examine the effects of region familiarity and region distortion on learning from cartograms, college undergraduates viewed a true-scale map of either a familiar or an unfamiliar region followed by either a cartogram or a data map of the same region. They then drew the true-scale map from memory, and matched map data-levels on a cued-recall map. Long-term familiarity was observed as an important prerequisite for successful use of cartograms. Cartogram depiction of unfamiliar regions resulted in inaccurate reconstructions and degraded levels of data recall. The results were interpreted with respect to cognitive theoretical assumptions. Suggestions were made regarding the instructional use of cartograms.