Walter S D
Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
Stat Med. 1993 Jul 30;12(14):1275-91. doi: 10.1002/sim.4780121402.
Maps have seen increasing use to examine regional variation in health, but there has been little research on the visual perception of spatial patterns in mapped data. Theories of graphical perception suggest that the interpretation of maps is complex relative to other types of graphical material. This paper describes an experiment in which observers assessed a series of maps with respect to their amount of clustering. Maps with various types of spatial pattern were visually distinguishable; comparisons between variants of the same map, however, using different shading and plotting symbols indicated that the method of data representation also had a strong effect on visual perception. There was some evidence for a learning effect in complex maps. The relationship between the visual assessments and a statistical measure of spatial autocorrelation was significant but imperfect.
地图在研究健康状况的区域差异方面的应用越来越广泛，但对于地图数据中空间模式的视觉感知却鲜有研究。图形感知理论表明，相对于其他类型的图形材料，地图的解读更为复杂。本文描述了一项实验，在该实验中观察者根据聚类程度对一系列地图进行评估。具有不同类型空间模式的地图在视觉上是可区分的；然而，使用不同的阴影和绘图符号对同一地图的不同变体进行比较表明，数据表示方法对视觉感知也有很大影响。在复杂地图中存在一些学习效应的证据。视觉评估与空间自相关统计量之间的关系显著但并不完美。
