The first and probably one of the most famous mental mapping studies is Kevin Lynch's.

In his book,"The Image of the City," he showed that people living in Boston, Los Angeles and Jersey City construct a sui-generis urban geography in their minds. This is constituted of landmarks, paths, nodes and edges, giving a qualitatively new dimension to urban space. His book, published in 1969, has stirred a lot of interest, and a vigorous movement for "mental mapping the world" was initiated.

The movement generated a number of books and studies with a specific focus on how people navigate through their environment. A great interest was aroused by the idea of mapping desirability and avoidance associated with various social spaces.

However, after a number of promising and exciting books, the movement petered out.

A possible cause of this development is the fact that mental maps are very hard to collect and analyze. The typical mental mapping project requires the subjects to color or draw maps on paper, using pencils.

Representation of the Lynch mental model after Stroheker, Barros, Slaughter, Mapping Psychological and Virtual Spaces

The end product is usually analyzed by simple aggregation, on a final map, of the elements found in the individual maps.

Sometimes, to simplify the procedure the researchers need to eliminate some elements and to emphasize others.

The end product is a new artifact, which owes to the researcher's imagination as much as it does to that of the respondents.

Relatively crude methods of mathematical map combination were used during the 80s, but they have never caught on. Sorin Matei has initiated the idea of using the new Geographic Information Systems (GIS) method of cartography for mental mapping procedures.

Paper and pencil maps are converted into computer graphics precisely georeferenced to a specific physical location.

These graphics are then converted into numeric matrices, which can be easily combined using mathematical operations, such as averaging. A detailed description of the procedure is offered in the tutorial.

Copyright © Sorin A. Matei, 2003

Last update: December 3, 2003

contact: mental@matei.org