The relative effectiveness of noncontiguous cartograms,
in presenting data were tested over a continumm of tasks
ranging from general to specific, using university students
as subjects.
A total of three tasks were examined, one task required
subjects to judge cartograms showing a very general
distribution, the second task required a moderate amount of
information to be retrieved, and the third task required
very specific information to be obtained from the cartogram.
Two sets of non contiguous cartograms of the United States
were used; one set had international and internal boundaries
the second set had only international boundaries.
In general students performed task one and two with a
great deal of accuracy, proving non contiguous cartograms are
a useful method of displaying geographic information. The
third task was less successful than the first two, although
this fact is not surprising, we learned that when displaying
and trying to retrieve very specific kinds of information,
the non contiguous cartogram is not a viable option.
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