Research On Personalized Map Cognition Mechanism

With the rapid development of geoscience, the new concepts of crowdsourcing data, location service, and ubiquitous mapping have penetrated deeply into the hearts of people. Accompanied the with various users’ requirements, data sources, design approaches, display media, implementation technologies and service levels, personalized maps are now in great need. However, still many tough problems in map planning have not been solved, such as different understanding to map elements between users and designers, insufficient evaluation on map suitability, deficient valuable monitoring for map cognitive process. As a result, the exploration to the cognitive mechanism of personalized maps becomes dramatically important. Meanwhile, as an innovative approach to the theoretical research in cartography, eye tracking technology has provided quantitative and qualitative supports to common map design and usability researches, and made personalized map cognitive process visualization possible. But so far, there is still a gap for such eye movement experiment has not been found in domestic scientific community. Therefore, the research in this area becomes valuable in theory and significant in reality.In this dissertation, taking personalized electronic map on computer screen for example, a combining research method, mainly combining questionnaire and eye movement experiment, is conducted to explore the subjective and objective elements, the quantitative evaluating method, and individual cognitive differences of the personalized map qualitatively and quantitatively. And more details are as follows:The first section is an introduction to the background and current research of personalized map cognition and its related fields. In this part, it gives an introduction to the research background, the writing purposes and significances, and summarizes the research status on the cognitive theory of personalized maps, eye tracking experiment, and technologies of customizing and template. And also some weak points in the current research are indicated.The second is the description of the theoretical framework and the method system of personalized map cognition. In this section, it firstly presents the basic concept, the classification, the features of personalized maps and its related issues, and elaborates some fundamental theories in cartography and cognitive psychology. After the introduction of the questionnaire, eye movement experiment and their analysis methods, the implementation idea and plan of this study is covered.The third is about the creation of the personalized map cognition factors model. In this section, an initial model is built on the basis of feature analysis theories. Then it is optimized by Factor Analysis of the first questionnaire. Furthermore, the criterion weight for the coming evaluation model is achieved. Meaningfully, the conclusion on the different classification of annotation and color of area symbol in users’ and cartographers’ brains is drawn by comparing the two models together.The fourth one is the evaluation on the suitability of personalized maps. In this section, a qualitative evaluation model for four given personalized maps is firstly established, after the Template Matching Theory and Prototype Matching Theory are introduced. At first, an importance investigation on map cognition elements is made. And then, starting from the easy idea, the cognitive differences on map elements are expounded by Variance Analysis and matching relation from map elements to the target samples clustering center. Finally, Linear Weighting Evaluation with map elements and criterion weights is adopted to measure the personalized map suitability evaluation model quantitatively.The fifth is about the verification of the quantitative suitability evaluation model and the exploration to integration and inaction of cognition factors in dynamic map cognitive process by innovative eye tracking methods. In the former part, the course of personalized map information processing and the representation of eye movement indexes to map cognition phases are described at first. Then the suitability evaluation model above is verified by the first eye movement experiment, with cognitive differences analysis and results visualization. In the latter part, what’s more, another two-factor-mixed eye movement experiment taking map symbols design for example is precise designed to show the integration of influencing factors, the interaction between map element and influencing factors, the monitor function of eye tracking method in each cognition phrase. The Gaze Plot picture is used to illustrate the difference of expert and novice in the dynamic cognition process. Additionally, the cognition differences are explained by cognitive theories, and the advantage of eye movement experiment is comparing with questionnaire and other methods.The last one is about the design principles of personalized maps and its example verification. Based on the cognitive mechanism on personalized maps, the design rules are put forward firstly. And then the design flow and its characteristics are indicated in detailed. After a personalized mapping experimental system is implemented via examples of map color and style, symbol and annotation, layout and toolbox, some and a preliminary evaluation is made.