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Mental map: A reliable definition of choice or a distorted recognition of space?

Mental map is considered as an individual’s mental representation of his/her spatial cognition. People learn from the environment and add information to their personal mental map. It becomes important when we try to understand the relationships between one’s travel decision processes and their choice sets. The aim of this paper is to study the relationship between individuals’ activity travel patterns and their mental map by exploring people’s spatial cognition, their activity space and related factors. Two-week travel diary and mental maps were collected for the same 57 individuals in Stockholm. Respondents were asked to report their recent trip information in the travel diary and draw their familiar areas in specified maps. The specified maps, to some extent, reflect respondents’ mental maps by transferring this abstract concept from one’s mind to a visual representation. The derived mental maps were manually drawn and transferred from graph to ASCII code in ArcGIS. The visited activity locations on where people travelled during the observed period were used to construct one’s activity space. The key determinants that construct these activity space and mental map will be investigated. Marginal effect of each key variable will be calculated to understand the magnitude of influence of each variable into the spatial distribution of the given individual’s activity space and mental map. The result shows that individual’s activity space is not necessarily within individual mental map. Both activity space and mental map are correlated with individual’s travel pattern factors. Mental map has positive influence to the formation of activity space. The inference of marginal effect is useful for urban planning, promoting transport policies and analyzing the effect of transport infrastructure since it can help to locate the places that constitute individual’s activity space and mental map areas.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kth-170631
Date January 2015
CreatorsZhang, Wen
PublisherKTH, Systemanalys och ekonomi
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
RelationTSC-MT ; 15-008

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