How to Make a Better Map—Using Neuroscience by Laura Bliss.
From the post:
The neuroscience of navigation has been big news lately. In September, Nobel Prizes went to the discoverers of place cells and grid cells, the neurons responsible for our mental maps and inner GPS. That’s on top of an ever-growing pile of fMRI research, where scientists connect regions of the brain to specific navigation processes.
But the more we learn about how our bodies steer from A to B, are cartographers and geographers listening up? Is the science of wayfinding finding its way into the actual maps we use?
It’s beginning to. CityLab spoke to three prominent geographers who are thinking about the perceptual, cognitive, and neurological processes that go on when a person picks up a web of lines and words and tries to use it—or, the emerging science of map-making.
The post tackles questions like:
How do users make inferences from the design elements on a map, and how can mapmakers work to make their maps more perceptually salient?
…
But her current research looks at not just how the brain correlates visual information with thematic relevance, but how different kinds of visualization actually affect decision-making.
…
“I’m not interested in mapping the human brain,” she says. “A brain area in itself is only interesting to me if it can tell me something about how someone is using a map. And people use maps really differently.”
Ready to put your map design on more than an ad hoc basis? No definite answers in Laura’s post but several pointers towards exploration yet to be done.
I first saw this in a tweet by Greg Miller.