According to the average scoring results, hydrography (70.1%) and roads (67.7%) categories were linked to highest scores, whereas settlements (30.5%) and land-cover (7.4%) were associated with the lowest ones. The drawing order for experts and novices shows a slight difference so that, while experts drew roads in the first place, novices focused more on hydrographic objects such as rivers and water bodies. Hydrography and roads categories form the main structuring elements on the maps. Settlements and land-cover elements (in this case, forest) were drawn third and fourth, respectively for both user groups.
The fact that both experts and novices drew linear objects (hydrography and roads) in the first place can be explained by the hierarchical structures of schemas in LTM. It gives a clear idea that their sketch maps are hierarchically constructed. This finding corresponds to what
Huynh and Doherty (2007) ,
\citealp{HUYNH_2008} and
\citet{v2015} found. They discovered that participants tended to draw the main linear structures before other landmarks.
Many variables such as colour and size can affect the drawing order. In the original stimulus, roads were linear objects depicted in red colour, whereas hydrographic objects could be linear (rivers) or areal (water bodies) representations depicted in blue colour. There is a perceptual order when viewing the colours on the map. Perceptual order of colour follows the colour spectrum of red, yellow, green and blue. To our knowledge of map design, red tends to focus in the foreground, yellow and green in the middle, and blue in the background [URL 1]. Thus important objects or the ones to emphasize are shown in red and blue is good colour for backgrounds. This can be the reason why the experts drew the red and linear objects (roads) in the first place. On the other hand, having had drawn the hydrographic elements in the first place, novices might found areal objects as important or interesting, thus memorable as linear objects. We can infer that size of the object is as much as important as colour for retrieval of the object. Except one participant every novices drew water bodies on their sketch maps, no matter the order is.
Discussing the influence of expertise in detail, expertise did not affect the drawing order among female participants. In fact, the scores of female experts and novices showed similarities in number. For instance, both expert and novice females drew hydrographic elements as initial objects and the score was 80.8 for experts, 81.3 for novice females. The scores for land-cover were almost the same; 6.2 and 6.3 for experts and novices, respectively. On the contrary, expert and novice male participants followed a different order. While most expert males drew roads (77.3) in the first place, most novice males chose hydrographic objects (70.8) (Figure 4).
Having explored the cognitive abilities among gender in detail, both female and male novices followed the same sequence with close scores. However, in expert group, there was a significant difference among genders, which may reveal insights about different recalling strategies followed by females and males. For instance, expert males drew roads in the first place, while expert females preferred drawing hydrographic elements (Figure 4).