Geoscience Reference
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This research aims to contribute towards a broader and more holistic under-
standing on what the world inside children's heads looks like through exploring
their representations and spatial abilities at three different geographical scales: the
local neighbourhood (test 1), the continents (test 2) and the Sun-Earth system
(test 3).
19.2 Theoretical Background
19.2.1 The Psychology of Geographical Space
When assessing children's mental maps of the world based on physical
representations, it is necessary to differ between psychological and physical
space. Because we are dealing with different spaces and scales, it is at the beginning
of this paper also important to “recognize the distinction between geographical
space and space at other scales or sizes” (Mark et al.
1999
). Besides defining
geographical space, the researched space in this study, its position within this
psychological-physical space duality needs to be addressed.
In
1978
O'Keefe and Nadel defined
psychological space
as “any space that is
attributed to the mind (
) and which would not exist if minds did not exist” and
physical space
as “any space attributed to the external world independent of the
existence of minds”. Many researchers have referred to this definitions since. While
children's mental maps belong to psychological space, the outcome measures
(external expressions of mental maps) used in this research respectively the route
map, the composed map of the continents and the Sun-Earth-Moon scheme are
in se
physical space.
The precise nature of
geographical space
on the other hand is not that easy to
describe. Geographical space being the space “
...
...
generally too large to be per-
ceived all at once” is an often referred to description provided by Downs and Stea
(1977). Building on this Mark et al. (
1999
) elaborated it and noted that while
geographical or large-scale spaces can only be experienced by “integration of
perceptual experiences over space and time through memory and reasoning, or
through the use of small-scale models such as maps”, small-scale spaces “are to be
seen from a single point, and typically are populated with manipulative objects,
many of which are made by humans”. To avoid terminological confusion it is to be
noticed here that for behavioural scientists large-scale spaces are relatively large
compared to small-scale spaces. Opposite, for geographers “a small-scale map is
small compared to the space that it represents” (Montello
1993
). Therefore, when
focussing on spatial abilities (
see further
Large- and small-scale spatial abilities)
the former interpretation, when referring to the children's representations of the
geographical space at different scales, the latter interpretation will be used in this
paper. The children's route maps (test 1) are thus large-scale compared with their
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