GEOGRAPHICAL DATA AS PSYCHOPHYSICAL STIMULI

L undberg U. & E kman G. Geographical data as psychophysical stimuli. Scand. J. Psychol . 1972, 13 , 81–88.—Thirty-three students reported their subjective estimates of the area, the number of people, and the average population density of 44 different countries. Subjective scales were constructed for each variable and it was found that these scales could be roughly described by simple power functions of the corresponding physical scales. The subjective scales were positively related to each other, and the correlations they showed exceeded the corresponding correlations between the physical variables. Empirical estimates of population density may be described by a simple power function of the expected subjective population density with the exponent of o.63.