Study of Cultural Impacts on Location Judgments in Eastern China

This paper examined cultural impacts on absolute and relative location estimates of 12 Eastern Chinese cities, based on questionnaires of each cityms latitude and distances between city pairs. Linear regression analysis of the latitude estimates revealed that the estimated latitude of a city is statistically significantly related to its actual latitude. MDS analysis of the distance estimates revealed the gap that divided Eastern China into two regions and cultural-related causation of the gap was explained in detail. In particular, the Chinese language and its impact on spatial cognition were addressed. Results were compared with North America; some important features of spatial cognition were similar: the categorical storage of spatial information and the absolute-relative location reasoning process.

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