Survey of the intersection of mental maps and visualization

The intersection between mental maps and visualization has attracted increasing research attention in recent years, as they exhibit a natural functional complementarity. Mental maps research explores how humans construct in-mind representations of the external world through the view of cognitive science, while visualization can transform implicit mental maps into concrete visual forms, thereby facilitating the analysis of their construction mechanisms. Visualization, a branch of computer science, investigates how to design human-friendly visual representations of digital data. Mental maps can provide human-perspective insights to guide visualization designs and improve the effectiveness of data understanding and analysis. This paper presents a literature survey of the recent research at this intersection. Regarding the visualizations of mental maps, the present study classifies relevant research into visualizations to depict structural topographies, attribute information in mental maps, and compare multiple mental maps. In terms of mental maps for visualization, this study categorizes the relevant research into the element structuring, structural mapping, and consistency maintenance mechanisms of mental maps to guide visualization designs. This paper introduces and discusses in detail representative works in these categories, providing future research opportunities at this intersection.