Cross-Cultural Differences in Cognitive Style, Individualism/Collectivism and Map Reading between Central European and East Asian University Students

Abstract

The article examines cross-cultural differences encountered in the cognitive processing of specific cartographic stimuli. We conducted a comparative experimental study on 98 participants from two different cultures, the first group comprising Czechs (N = 53) and the second group comprising Chinese (N = 22) and Taiwanese (N = 23). The findings suggested that the Central European participants were less collectivistic, used similar cognitive style and categorized multivariate point symbols on a map more analytically than the Asian participants. The findings indicated that culture indeed influenced human perception and cognition of spatial information. The entire research model was also verified at an individual level through structural equation modelling (SEM). Path analysis suggested that individualism and collectivism was a weak predictor of the analytic/holistic cognitive style. Path analysis also showed that cognitive style considerably predicted categorization in map point symbols.