5.1.3 Cognitive maps

Examining the sketch maps that Maureen and Kai Wen, and Bing Qiang and Kwok Yaw produced as they worked their way along the route illustrates that Alex was not the only one to notice the MRT track.  The sketch produced by the first leading pair is given in Figure 8, and that by the second leading pair is in Figure 9. The given checkpoints were ‘525’, ‘track’, ‘RC’, ‘post box’, ‘playground’, ‘hump’, ‘no football’, ‘fence’, ‘shelter’, ‘gate’, ‘Xiao Guilin’, ‘meeting point’, ‘trash bin’, ‘Bukit Gombak trail’ and ‘carpark’.

These sketch maps both show evidence of attempts at preserving orientational and scalar information.  They are similar in several ways, not only in their featuring and representation of the MRT track, but also in their general orientation and appearance, and in the choice of intermediate checkpoints (such as public housing blocks). 

Subsequent analyses of other data sets from both the pilot and main studies show that housing blocks and the axial lines of public transport routes consistently figure prominently in the mental maps of the adolescents involved in the study.  This social language and its associated sign systems constitute the semiotic building tasks of Gee’s (1999) so-called ‘situation network’, and are positively corroborated with the subject matter of many of the photographs taken during the various perspectives tasks undertaken by participants in the entire study, although it must be said that for the particular perspectives task engaged in by this team of seven at Little Guilin, there was little evidence of them straying off-topic. 

<- 5.1.2 Orienteering task          -> 5.1.4 Perspectives task