Get to know a place by walking through it and leading the way on your own

I want to first share a story about my Mom and myself. My mom is really poor at way finding, but for years she had kept driving me to school (about 30-40 minutes) when I was very young. I knew that she remembered in heart how to get to my school from home and how to get back home by seeing the road signs – first go along this road and then turn right onto that road, etc. I didn’t get it because I could easily figure out the route by recognizing some features on the road, such as a bridge, a park, or a fancy building around a corner. When I saw the bridge I knew we need to go across it; when I saw the park I knew we need to keep going until the next corner and it’s time to change lane; when I saw the fancy building I knew that we were almost there at our destination. My mom and I have different schemata of navigation and orientation. If she by mistake makes a wrong turn before the park, she loses her route. But as for me, I know pretty well that if we go around the park, we can easily go back again onto the original route. Obviously I have a better cognitive map than my mom does.

Now I am here away from home and I have my own car. It’s my second year staying here, but at first Ann Arbor was totally a new place to me, so that whenever I went out in my car I set up Google Map navigation. The first time I need Google Map, the second time I still need it, the third time, the fourth time… Now I cannot live without it! I live in North Campus but it took almost a month until I was able to drive within North Campus without navigation. Moreover, it’s been one year and I still cannot find the way to Rave Cinemas without Google Map! I have to admit that I rely on it too much. And I learned that such a navigation can never help you build your mental maps.

Central Campus seemed even worse to me. If I hadn’t taken two courses at central campus this semester and have to commute every day, you may probably still see me holding the google map when I walk through the Diag trying to find a building. I have driven to central campus many times within the past one year, but I still failed to have an effective mental map depicting what central campus is like. However, only a week after this semester started, I got to know it pretty well. I know where the DANA building, the East Hall, the Angel Hall, and the Modern Language Building is. I have classes in these buildings and I have to walk among these places. As a result, I also got familiar with the surrounding areas such as E Washington Street, S University Avenue, N University Avenue, and S State Street. I knew these places before in pieces, but now I finally gained an overview, and have in mind a combined network of these places as well as how they connect to each other.

Based on so many experiences, I believe that building an effective mental map, or a cognitive map requires two major elements: attention and working process. Driving or taking a car/bus impedes attention, while driving with Google Map navigation impedes both. Compared with walking, a car or a bus moves faster. Walking gives us more time to pay attention to objects nearby and more time to digest the surrounding features. It slows down the speed of mental processing, which gives us enough time to build the internal representations as well as the association between them.

 When driving with the navigation on, we have to spare some of our attention focusing on the navigation rather than the road itself. What’s more, with the navigation, we have the confidence that we will get to the destination, because even if we go onto a wrong way, the navigation can quickly fix it up. In this case, we tend to be lazy and don’t bother to think by ourselves. The same is true when we go somewhere with a tour guide. What we do is just following, with no need to figure out the route by ourselves. By leading the way on our own, we can build a cognitive map through thinking and learning.

That is not to say that navigation or a map in hand is not good at all. It may not help with building a cognitive map during the time we are travelling, but it does help prior to the traveling. By studying a city’s map before going there, we may have some kind of expectations about that place. We may have in mind where the down town is. Maybe there is a river, a park, a museum, etc., that we can go to. We may figure out a general route connecting all these interesting sites. Expectations toward an event have been verified to have a positive effect on the interaction with it. And that is why the professor ask us to do the readings before the lecture.

Resouces:

1. Kaplan, S., Weaver, M. & Fu, L. (Draft) Chapter 4: Building Models. In A Small Brain In a Big World.

2. Hunt, M. E. (1984). Environmental learning without being there. Environment and Behavior. 16, 307 - 334

3. Falk, J. H., & Dierking, L. D. (1992). The museum experience. Washington, DC: Whalesback Books. Excerpt pp.30 - 35.