The Cognitive Limits of Animated Maps

When it comes to designing animated maps, the bottleneck is no longer the hardware, the software, or the data – it is the limited visual and cognitive processing capabilities of the map reader. Only sporadic progress has been made within GIScience in answering even the most basic questions: Under what conditions and for what kinds of map-reading tasks are animated maps effective, and how can their effectiveness be increased? Fortunately, over the past 20 years cognitive researchers in psychology and education have created a comprehensive set of theories that explain how people look at and learn from dynamic images, under what conditions these images work or fail, and why. Moreover, numerous controlled experiments, often designed to replicate and build upon previous studies, have validated these theories (something that is rare in cartography). This article presents a synthesis of this research and shows how it (1) directly informs mapping practices, (2) explains important cognitive differences between sta...

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