Affecting Decision Making: Eliciting Emotional Responses during Map Reading through Music

Long recognized in the arts, the influence of sounds and music on emotional reactions to visual stimuli remains remarkably unconsidered in cartography. Social scientists are increasingly aware that cognitive processing and decision making cannot be fully understood without accounting for affect. Geographic representations are often designed for decision making, but strategies for representing, incorporating and eliciting emotion in decision making have yet to be formalized with maps. Maps used in decision making are not often considered satisfactory to convey mood and emotion; is the mapped area scary, delightful, depressing, invigorating? The adjectives above, however, are frequently used to describe music; composers, musicologists, and even neuroscientists are aware of the conventions used in music to elicit these sorts of emotions. With the ubiquity of broadband Internet, widespread acceptance and use of web maps, and low cost of audio-ready computers, the time is ripe (or has already passed) to fold in conventions of music into the existing body of cartographic conventions. Here, we present a web-based experiment that investigates whether adding a music bed to a simple decision-making environment can influence decisions and, perhaps more importantly, influence the emotional reactions of subjects upon seeing (and hearing) the maps. In the experiment, subjects in three groups are shown identical visual stimuli (fictional city maps through an interactive interface) and asked identical questions about the city, including locating a place in the city to which they would most prefer to move. The sole difference among the groups was the type of music that played in the background as they made their decisions. This paper will describe and demonstrate the experiment and report on preliminary findings.