MENTAL MAP

This is a mental map of Coal City, Illinois in the 1940's. The author of a world geography book is illustrating the memory of her neighborhood when she was a child. Note the child like references to specific places and people who had an impact on her life. Mental maps are considered highly abstracted representations of real world locations and show a person's personal perception of their own world. This is certainly evident with this map and the detailed depictions and descriptions such as the family dog, her father walking to the depot, the spot where her mother killed chickens and Ms. Bush's scary old house. I think this is a great example of a mental map and how one person's memory of childhood influenced the scale and placement of things on the map.

Link to website source:
http://www.uky.edu/~ulack/Geo152/Syllabus152Fall05.htm