By: Carmella Whittaker
New UW-Madison research group connects psychology to cartography
Close your eyes and picture the last map you used. While it might be tempting to envision your last geography class, maps are everywhere, unnoticed. From navigation apps to building floor plans, we all use maps in everyday life without much thought.
Now, imagine your daily path to work or school. Can you see an overhead map of the turns you make, or the view of the sidewalks you walk on? Maybe you can’t picture the path, despite the hundreds of times you’ve taken it.
The NeuroCarto research group, founded in 2023 as part of UW-Madison’s 72-year-old Cartography Lab, explores this intersection between psychology and cartography. Assistant Professor of Cartography and Geovisualization Bill Limpisathian serves as the associate director and primary investigator of NeuroCarto, where he researches how people cognitively use maps in order to improve their construction.
Currently, Limpisathian is investigating how individuals with aphantasia interact with maps. Aphantasia – the inability to visualize or create mental images – affects 1 to 4 percent of the population, according to Psychology Today.
“A large part of cartographic cognition theory has been focused on how we are able to think about our spaces … visually in our minds to make choices, navigate, and interact with our spaces,” Limpisathian says. “[Yet] individuals with aphantasia are still able to interact and think about spaces.”
If people can’t picture the world but can still navigate it, what does that mean for the role of visual cognition in maps? Limpisathian hypothesizes that spatial cognition may rely less on visualization than once thought.
“There’s clearly a different [mental] route that you can use to think about spaces that [has] been ignored this whole time, and that route could help us better understand how we live our lives [and] make maps,” reflects Limpisathian.
Studying something as subjective as this visual imagery makes empirical testing challenging. Limpisathian therefore plans to use neuroimaging to identify the brain regions associated with spatial tasks in individuals with aphantasia.
“[Hopefully] there are some groupings that will form within the data based on people’s self-identified abilities to mentally visualize,” he says.
NeuroCarto member and second year master’s student Brynn Patrello similarly plans to use psychological methods to study the effects of stress on map interaction. “I’ll be using stress induction methods on participants, giving them a map, and observing their behavior while completing different tasks,” she explains.
This past year, Patrello received the Best Cartographic Design award at the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) Conference for the Student Print Poster competition. At the same conference, NeuroCarto’s Natalie Correa, a first-year master’s student, presented her undergraduate thesis on queer students’ perceptions of fear and community in the United States. Her research introduced a novel application of sketch mapping, a cartographic technique, to make psychological observations.
Instead of imaging the brain itself, sketch mapping asks participants to draw a map from memory or on an outline to illustrate how they think about and remember spaces. As Correa explains, “By simulating their thought patterns on a page, or giving them that representation of space and then asking them their perceptions on it, [you can understand] their connections to it.”
While the NeuroCarto group may be new, these innovative leaps in cartographic research seek to resolve continued challenges in the field. “I’m proud to think about how we can evolve the research group to help address some of the issues that exist in cartography,” Limpisathian concludes.
As the students of NeuroCarto pursue unique research to make better maps, Limpisathian’s aphantasia focus will require neural imaging and participants to continue. You can learn more about NeuroCarto’s research at neurocarto.geography.wisc.edu