Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
to accomplish tasks will lead to reflections about user expectations and
what map-makers can do to satisfy them, especially concerning the less-
specialized audience products.
MacEachren (1995) affirms that the user's interaction with a map is a
complex information processing event and cognitive representations of
what is seen are built in order to later provide the basis for understanding
the map. So, cognitive science plays an important role in this kind of
research: psychology science sees cognition as an interpreter of the world
in which we live, in order to provide better knowledge and understanding
of it. However, our preferences, related not only to cognition but also to
affect, also help us to understand, acting as a system of judgment, indicating
what is better for survival (Norman 2004).
This research relies on the belief that people prefer visual variables based
on personal experiences and cultural factors, that, in Brazil, led to the
intuition that color variation is the best choice to analyze geographic
phenomena. The main hypothesis being evaluated is that this intuition is not
always directly related to deeper levels of understanding and knowledge
about what is depicted, and as a consequence, color would not necessarily
be more effective than other graphic variables when analyzing spatial data
in order to make a decision, considering the same conditions.
1.1 Visual perception
Visual perception is the ability to visualize and embed the light signals that
reach our eyes with meaning. Gordon (2004) reminds that human percep-
tion occurs in two distinguishable environments, the natural and the artifi-
cial. One is related to all the natural surfaces, textures and patterns which
are part of the perception evolution since early ages. The other is formed
by the human culture, which deals with language, symbols and several arti-
facts that are human creations. It seems to be important to take into
account both environments, adding a real context to the experiment itself,
that, in turn, must look like the situation in which is understood as a feasible
map use situation for the map techniques and graphic variables used by
them.
Perception is associated and maybe dependent to visual cognition which is
the first dominant aspect of dealing with graphic variables for map sym-
bols. The vision itself has stages, which are distinctive: the
preattentive
