Systematic Distortions in Cognitive Maps: The North American West Coast vs. the (West) Coast of Israel

This article suggests a second thought on two papers published in Cognitive psychology in 1978 and 1981. Both articles deal with systematic distortions in cognitive mapping and both are based on experiments conducted along the North American West Coast. The first, by Stevens and Coupe, deals with distortions due to hierarchical organization while the second, by Tversky, with distortions due to rotation. Our second thought follows a set empirical results from a study conducted along the (West) coast of Israel. These results suggest that the experiments, on the basis of which the above two forms of systematic distortions were determined, could have resulted from another form of systematic distortion that we term the edge effect.