The project investigates how cartographic components affect spatial skills and memory on a neuroscientific level

An interdisciplinary research team from the Geographical Institute/AG Cartography (Prof. Dr. Frank Dickmann) and the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience (Prof. Dr. Nikolai Axmacher) at the Ruhr University Bochum aims to gain fundamental new insights into how people interpret map information and how the efficiency of maps or map-based interfaces can be optimized based on findings from brain research. Maps provide information about orientation, i.e. object positions (landmarks), distances, and angles between landmarks. To date, we still lack a systematic understanding on a cognitive and neuroscientific level of how such cartographic components contribute to generating spatial skills. The aim of the interdisciplinary project is to clarify how brain cells and networks that constitute a “spatial map” in the human medial temporal lobe are stabilized by cartographic cues of real maps. Neuroscientific evidence about navigationally relevant cell types may provide a novel conceptual and empirical framework for a fundamental understanding of map-based information processing. We hypothesize that revealing the mechanisms of how spatially responsive cells in the human brain (and in particular, grid cells) react to cartographic cues will enable systematic improvements of map designs. Cartographic cues are thus key to both understanding and influencing grid cell activities, which may in turn improve navigation performance when using maps. Highlighting specific map elements and inserting additional graphic structures in a way that matches the properties of grid cells may align grid cell firing in a controlled manner. In the project, we will conduct a series of behavioral and fMRI experiments in order to systematically examine the effects of various different cartographic cues on the firing patterns of grid cells and navigational performance. We hypothesize that different geometrical symmetries may serve distinct functions for spatial information processing: While orthogonal lines and borders may provide directional information, the repetitive triangular tiling provided by grid cell axes enables extracting distance information.