The Cognitive Analysis For Schematic Maps And Experimental Platform Building

Schematic maps provide a clearer expression for the main map features by highly simplified representations.As the schematic map is clear,beautiful and easy to follow,more and more urban subway,road and bus network and others are represented by schematic maps.Although schematic maps have been widely used,the schematic maps currently in use are still manually designed by cartographic experts.The generation process is time-consuming and laborious.Numerous existing studies have focused on the automated generation of schematic maps and proposed many automatic algorithms and design rules.However,current studies on the assessments of the cognitive effectiveness of schematic maps generated by these algorithms and rules are conducted for the aspects of map usability in the manner of the stimuli-response model which has been widely applied in the field of cognitive psychology.Furthermore,it is necessary to analysis the cognitive process when user completing certain tasks by schematic maps,such as the road navigation,route planning,etc.so that it is comprehensive to understand the cognition of schematic maps.Therefore,this paper aims at the improvement of current studies on the assessments of the cognitive effectiveness of schematic maps and further analysis of the cognitive process for schematic maps.The research contents are as follows:(1)Attention is paid to the evaluation of cognitive effectiveness of the illustrative maps at different geometric levels,i.e.node,route and pattern.Based on the stimuli-response model commonly used in psychology,cognitive-efficiency assessments are performed for schematic maps.(2)Task driven cognitive process analysis of schematic maps.Through the user to complete some tasks of the map recognition to analysis the user's cognitive process from stimulus to response.(3)Building of schematic maps cognitive evaluation experiment platform.In order to convenience the cognitive assessments of schematic map,an experimental platform is developed by integrating questionnaire and eye-movement software environment into the platform.The experiment results indicate that this study can effectively assess the cognitive effectiveness of the schematic maps,and find the disadvantages and advantages of map cognition for the schematic maps generated by current design rules by analyzing the cognitive process,which is help to improve the design rules of schematic maps.