Many non-geographic factors influence spatial judgments, which implies that spatial representations are not metrically veridical. We investigated the influence of social and political factors in the geopolitical context of Cyprus–an island divided since 1974 into the Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot communities in the north and south, respectively. Participants (249 Greek Cypriots, 322 Turkish Cypriots) indicated their familiarity with 19 towns, estimated town locations, and the straight-line distance between those towns. They also rated their attitudes toward the other community. Cypriots underestimated distances and contracted the placement of towns within the other community more so than within their own community. Moreover, those more willing to live together with Cypriots from the other community underestimated distances between towns, whereas those less willing to live together overestimated distances. The results support the notion that representations of global-scale environments have multi-faceted origins, including sociopolitical factors not usually associated with spatial representations.

Two experiments revealed how non-experts interpret visualizations of positional uncertainty on GPS-like displaysand how the visual representation of uncertainty affects their judgments. Participants were shown maps with representations oftheir current location; locational uncertainty was visualized as either a circle (confidence interval) or a faded glyph (indicatingthe probability density function directly). When shown a single circle or faded glyph, participants assumed they were locatedat the center of the uncertain region. In a task that required combining two uncertain estimates of their location, the mostcommon strategy – integration – was to take both estimates into account, with more weight given to the more certain estimate.Participants’ strategies were not affected by how uncertainty was visualized, but visualization affected the consistency of theirresponses. The results indicate that non-experts have an intuitive understanding of uncertainty and that the best visualizationmethod is task dependent.