Spatial cognition deals with the cognition of spatial properties of the world

including location

size

distance

direction

shape

pattern

movement

and inter-object relations.Mental map is the representation result of spatial cognition about such spatial characteristics of the real geographic world.It has the following properties: heterogeneously representing space

subjectively selecting objects

uncertainly locating entity

and inaccurately measuring scale.The mental map consists of discrete pieces

such as landmarks

routes and regions

which is determined by physical

perceptual

or conceptual boundaries.For the content organization

the pieces have multiple levels without complete connection revealed by patterns of errors.In order to represent and visualize this kind of map

special visualization methods are required rather than the traditional map.This study investigates some qualitative visualization approaches presenting three methods to represent mental maps focused on different contents.They are the schematic map representing road network cognition

the cartogram map representing the area distribution information cognition and the cybermap representing the topological cyberspace cognition.The schematic map is a linear abstractions of functional networks including roads

railways

shipping lanes and footpaths.The network representation clarifies the operational relationships and describes the topology in simplified form.The schematic map suits for representing network cognition because it closely mimics the way we store the road cognition information about our physical environment in our memory.The orientation and distance representation is coarse but the relative connection relationship is accurate.This kind of qualitative visualization focuses on the topological relationship which is important in our quickly searching for the navigation information.In our mind we also use the simple map to represent and to justify the spatial orientation and distance.In contrast

the traditional cartographic road map is difficult to get the navigation although it is accurate.The cartogram

also called value-by-area map is a type of graphic that depicts attributes of geographic objects as the object’s area.The value-by-area mapping technique encodes the mapped data in a simple and efficient manner.The attribute can be a country’s population

its literacy rate

or GDP.In our memory the important attribute usually gets a large image patch and the spatial relation distributes in a topological connection rather than accurate connection.We don’t care the exact spatial relation

object shape and orientation.The cartogram converts the background data to a visualization representation so that the attribute information is easy to recognize.So the cartogram map is adaptable to represent attribute information cognition.The cyberspace is defined as a computer-generated landscape

the virtual space of a global computer network

linking all people

computer and sources of various information in the world through which one could navigate.As the virtual space cognition tool

the cyber map provides the user with quick ways to access what he wants

to navigate the hit paths.It focuses on the topological information representation in virtual space cognition and navigation.This kind of map can be used to represent the cognition information about virtual space.Three qualitative representation maps have the same property that concerns on the topological information to describe the coarse cognition result in our mind.From the perspective of the map definition

the paper examines the measurement characteristics and proves that they have measurement properties at order scale level.