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PhD Research

I was awarded my PhD in 2012. The title of my thesis was "Children’s Cognitive Representations of the Local Environment".

Children's sketch maps

The main method used in the thesis was to analyse children's sketched maps in terms of accuracy and detail.

The research for my PhD involved analysing hundreds of route and area maps that were drawn for me by Primary School children. I worked with older children, my sample were all in the last three years of primary school (Years 4, 5 and 6), and I used area maps as well as route maps, but I thought it might be of interest to you. The basic hypothesis of the study was that the ways in which children travel provide different types of interaction with the environment, and that different levels of interaction will lead to better or worse cognitive representations of the local environment. On the whole, unaccompanied walking was associated with the most accurate area sketch maps, and being a car passenger the least accurate. It wasn't possible to rule out the possibility that children with better cognitive mapping skills were given more freedom, and trusted to walk on their own. I was, however, able to show that better maps were produced by children who took part in a lot of other unstructured, unsupervised activities, and there did seem to be a link between behaviour in the local environment and mental representations. Are you interested in the different styles of representation used for the landmarks in the children's maps? There is an interesting shift from pictorial (where all the elements are drawn side on from a child's point of view) to plan style maps (top down representation of elements) that occurs as children develop their mapping skills. I also had the opportunity to study children's behaviour, including the journey, with GPS tracking. It turns out that GPS is not as reliable as I had hoped, but it did work sometimes! The attached picture shows an example of a GPS trace that could be matched to elements in a child's sketch map of the journey they had taken to school.

Comparing Cognitive Maps with the real world

The image below shows how a child's sketched map differs from the local environment it represents. The markers on the map show the true locations of the points that have been represented in the child's map.

Example of a comparison between a child's sketched map and the real world
The above map gives and example of a comparison between the elements in a child's sketched map, shown in the white circle, and the real world positions of the same elements.