Acquiring information from simple weather maps: Influences of domain-specific knowledge and general visual–spatial abilities

doi:10.1016/j.lindif.2007.01.003

Learning and Individual Differences

Volume 16, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 337-349

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2007.01.003 Get rights and content

Abstract

The influences of domain-specific meteorological knowledge and general visual–spatial abilities on the comprehension of simple weather maps were examined in a regression-based study involving a sample of participants with relatively low meteorological knowledge and in an experiment involving a contrast between samples of higher- and lower-knowledge participants. Results from the first study indicated that the roles of domain-specific knowledge and visual–spatial abilities for lower-knowledge individuals were strongly influenced by the presence of supporting geographic information (i.e., city locations) in the weather maps being interpreted. Results from the second study underscored the importance of domain-specific meteorological knowledge and map familiarity and, surprisingly, pointed to a single visual–spatial ability (speed of closure) that mediated both of these influences.

Section snippets

Experiment 1

The purpose of this study was to examine, using regression techniques, the impact of meteorological knowledge and visual–spatial abilities on individuals' ability to acquire location-specific information from weather maps. Tests of meteorological knowledge and four visual–spatial abilities were administered to a sample of young adults who had no special education in the domain of weather and climate. Scores from these tests were used to determine the extent to which these measures predicted

Participants

Data were collected from 89 university students (23 men and 66 women) between the ages of 18 and 52 years (mean = 22.5 years), who participated voluntarily to receive research participation credit in Psychology courses. All participants resided in South Carolina at the time of their involvement in the study and were familiar with weather maps depicting conditions in that state.

Test of meteorological knowledge

Under guidance of our meteorologist, we developed a 20-item multiple-choice test of meteorological knowledge, referred to

Procedure

Participants were tested in small groups. Initially, they completed a test booklet that included the following tests in the order of administration: Building Memory Test, Gestalt Completion Test, Power Quick Inventory of Meteorological Knowledge, Map Planning Test, and Hidden Patterns Test. Following completion of this booklet, participants were administered the Weather Map Comprehension Task. The weather maps used in this task were presented by means of an overhead projector, and participants

Results

Performance on the five tests and the Weather Map Comprehension Task are summarized by descriptive statistics showing the mean and standard deviation for each. Factors influencing the acquisition of weather information from maps were determined in step-wise regression analyses in which performance on the Weather Map Comprehension Task served as the dependent variable and scores from the Power Quick Inventory and the four tests of visual–spatial abilities were used as predictors.

Discussion

The results point to some important implications regarding cognitive factors as they serve to constrain or otherwise influence efforts to acquire location-specific information from weather maps. First, it appears that meteorological knowledge, geographic knowledge, and visual–spatial abilities can all play important roles in weather map comprehension. However, the data suggest that these factors are interrelated in interesting ways. Meteorological knowledge was crucial to success in acquiring

Experiment 2

The purposes of this experiment were to (a) differentiate the effects of meteorological knowledge from those of familiarity of the mapped region on simple weather map comprehension, (b) examine the influences of both map familiarity and supporting geographic information in the form of city information, and (c) replicate and extend the findings of the first experiment with respect to the influence of weather knowledge and visual–spatial abilities. To accomplish these objectives, two groups of

Participants

Data were collected from 61 university students (26 men and 35 women) between the ages of 18 and 37 years of age (mean = 20.8 years), who participated voluntarily to receive their choice of either research participation credit in Psychology courses or payment ($10). Thirty participants (19 men and 11 women) had taken a university course containing formal instruction in weather and climate and thus comprised the “higher meteorological knowledge” group; they were recruited through announcements and

Effects of meteorological knowledge and map familiarity

To examine the impact of meteorological knowledge and map familiarity on simple weather map comprehension, a 2 (meteorological knowledge: higher versus lower group) × 2 (map familiarity: U.S. versus Anilora) × 2 (city location information: present versus absent) mixed ANOVA was performed on proportion of correct trials in the weather map comprehension task. The p < .05 level of significance was applied to all analyses in this study. A preliminary analysis had revealed no significant effects or

Discussion

One of the chief purposes of this study was to determine whether meteorological knowledge and map familiarity exerted separate influences on simple weather map comprehension. The results of this experiment indicated that this is indeed the case; individuals with higher-level knowledge outperformed those with lower-level knowledge regardless of the familiarity of the nation shown in the weather map, and, regardless of their meteorological knowledge, observers were more accurate with a familiar

General discussion

The acquisition of information from simple weather maps is an excellent problem for studying the interrelations between domain-specific knowledge and visual–spatial abilities as factors influencing comprehension of common diagrammatic forms. Previous research had clearly indicated the importance of both of these factors (Hegarty et al., 1996, Hegarty and Steinhoff, 1997, Lowe, 1994, Lowe, 1996). Yet, much remained to be learned about how they are related in successful comprehension. Results

References (18)

M. Hegarty et al.
Individual differences in the use of diagrams as external memory in mechanical reasoning
Learning and Individual Differences
(1997)
R.K. Lowe
Construction of a mental representation from an abstract technical diagram
Learning and Instruction
(1993)
M.J. Sholl et al.
Cognitive correlates of map-reading ability
Intelligence
(1982)
P.W. Thorndyke et al.
Individual differences in knowledge acquisition from maps
Cognitive Psychology
(1980)
R.B. Ekstrom et al.
Kit of factor-referenced cognitive tests
P.P. Gilmartin et al.
Comparing the sexes on spatial abilities: Map-use skills
Annals of the Association of American Geographers
(1984)
M. Hegarty
Mental animation: Inferring motion from static displays of mechanical systems
Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition
(1992)
M. Hegarty et al.
Diagrams in the comprehension of scientific texts
R. Logie
Visuo-spatial working memory

There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (24)

An automatic trough line identification method based on improved UNet
2021, Atmospheric Research
Citation Excerpt :
The ability of trough to greatly affect forecasters' predictions makes it essential for weather analysis. In the upper-air weather map, the trough is usually represented by a line that connects the maximum points of cyclonic curvature in the low-pressure trough of isolines (Allen et al., 2006). Automatic trough line analysis can objectively assist forecasters in diagnosing weather system structure and improve the efficiency of weather analysis.
A trough is an elongated region of relatively low atmospheric pressure. Automatic analysis and recognition of trough lines in upper weather charts are challenging and of great significance to weather analysis. The existing automatic identification methods mainly depend on manually setting rules which cannot cover all trough line types and have low generalization ability. This paper proposes an automatic trough line identification method based on an improved model which can extract the trough line from meteorological element data at 500 hPa. The model adopts the UNet of a U-shaped encoder and decoder as basic structure, which is designed to enable precise localization by continuously combining low-level and high-level features. To extract abstract semantic features of the trough, the Xception, which takes depthwise separable convolution as basic unit, is adopted to replace the encoder of the original UNet. In addition, the Squeeze and Excitation (SE) module with an attention mechanism is added after each ordinary convolution in the decoder part to improve the recognition accuracy by increasing the weighting of the trough area. The experiments are conducted on a meteorological dataset and the results show that the recognition accuracy with our proposed method on the testing dataset can reach over 80%. We also compare our results to several other types of networks and traditional automatic identification methods, which demonstrates that the performance of the proposed network is superior to other methods.
Does updating natural hazard maps to reflect best practices increase viewer comprehension of risk?
2020, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction
Citation Excerpt :
Moreover, relevant spatial abilities also depend on the type of spatial task. For example, in studies of map utilization, the map is continuously present (e.g., Ref. [35]). By contrast, studies of map learning require the recall and reproduction of map elements (e.g., Refs. [57,58]).
In this study, we examine whether updating an interactive hazard map using recommendations from the literature improves user map comprehension. Analyses of experimental data collected from 75 university students revealed that map comprehension scores were not significantly better for those who viewed a “best practices” map compared to those who viewed an existing version. This may be because the existing map was itself better than most other interactive maps. Additionally, we found map comprehension levels to have significant positive relationships with objective tests, but not self-reported measures of spatial ability. Moreover, self-reported spatial ability had statistically significant, but only moderately strong, correlations with objective tests. These results indicate that spatial ability should be measured objectively rather than through self-reported methods in research on map comprehension. Further research is needed to examine the cognitive processes involved in hazard map comprehension, especially using a broader range of map characteristics and population segments with more diverse cognitive abilities.
Understanding Map Misinterpretation: Factors Influencing Correct Map Reading and Common Errors
2023, ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information
Integration of Cultural and Natural Heritage Information in Future Mobile Guides
2022, UMAP2022 - Adjunct Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization
DeepLab Network for Meteorological Trough Line Recognition
2021, ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
Service-aware interactive presentation of items for decision-making
2020, Applied Sciences (Switzerland)

View all citing articles on Scopus

^☆: We dedicate this paper to the senior author, Gary Allen, who died in January, 2007 after a long battle with cancer. His passing is a huge loss to his family, friends, and his profession. We miss him greatly.

View full text

Acquiring information from simple weather maps: Influences of domain-specific knowledge and general visual–spatial abilities☆

Abstract

Section snippets

Experiment 1

Participants

Test of meteorological knowledge

Procedure

Results

Discussion

Experiment 2

Participants

Effects of meteorological knowledge and map familiarity

Discussion

General discussion

Learning and Individual Differences

Learning and Instruction

Intelligence

Cognitive Psychology

Kit of factor-referenced cognitive tests

Comparing the sexes on spatial abilities: Map-use skills

Annals of the Association of American Geographers

Mental animation: Inferring motion from static displays of mechanical systems

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition

Diagrams in the comprehension of scientific texts

Visuo-spatial working memory