Levels of Detail in Descriptions and Depictions of Geographic Space

When navigating, people often rely upon a variety of geographic information sources to guide them to their destinations. These include maps, descriptions, or a combination of these as displayed traditionally on paper or through high-tech (handheld and in-vehicle) navigation devices. Maps provide a graphic representation of an environment and can vary in level of spatial (e.g., granularity) and labeling (e.g., label addition/removal) details. Likewise, written descriptions of an environment also vary in their levels of spatial (e.g., inclusion or exclusion of spatial information) and labeling (e.g., label addition/removal) detail. Importantly, experience within and memory for an environment may change as a function of these variations. The present experiments examine the interactions of spatial and labeling detail in generating and using mental representations of college campuses. The results of four experiments demonstrate that reducing spatial details through graphic generalization can increase memory for verbally presented information. Results additionally demonstrate the importance of balancing spatial and verbal detail in maps and descriptions in correspondence with human working memory constraints. Accordingly, we present a limited model of appropriate spatial and verbal generalization strategies, with particular regard to implementation in geographical positioning devices.