Cognitive Aspects: How People Perceive, Memorize, Think and Talk About Landmarks - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 73

Fig. 3.8 What is further east:
San Diego or Reno?
The classical experiment to provide evidence for this type of hierarchy has
been made by Stevens and Coupe [ 206 ] . They asked participants to estimate the
direction between pairs of cities that are located in different states or countries. For
example, they were asked to estimate the direction from San Diego (California) to
Reno (Nevada). Since the state of Nevada is east of the state of California, most
participants made biased direction estimates to the east. But the direction from San
Diego (California) to Reno (Nevada) is actually north-northwest (Fig. 3.8 ) . Running
the experiment for multiple pairs of cities, the only explanation for the consistent
distortions the participants made in their estimates is by assuming hierarchical
reasoning.
This hierarchic reasoning strategy can be illustrated by many more examples.
Ask yourself (or your friends) which city is further North, Vienna or Munich,
keeping in mind that Austria is south of Germany. Which city is further
east, Vienna or Prague? Many people still remember Europe's division into
a western and eastern bloc, and Prague being located in the Eastern Bloc. In
contrast, most people have long forgotten or never learned that Prague was
once (twice) capital of the Holy Roman Empire (from 1346 to 1437, and from
1583 to 1611), and hence, is quite centrally located in Europe. And which city
is further south, Adelaide or Melbourne, given that Adelaide is the capital of
South Australia? If you are more familiar with other regions in the world you
will find other pairs of cities.