The geographically informed person must mentally organize spatial in¬formation about people, places, and environments and must be able to call upon and use this information in appropriate contexts. Knowing the locations and characteristics of people, places, and environments is a necessary precursor to—and outcome of—geographic learning and thinking. An effective way of doing this is developing and using a mental map: an individual’s internalized representation of as¬pects of the Earth, its people, and their interactions.
These maps are what a person knows about the locations and charac¬teristics of places at a variety of scales, from the local (the layout of a person’s bedroom) to the global (the distribution of oceans and continents across Earth). Mental maps are a mix of objective knowledge and subjective perceptions: precise knowledge about the location of geographic features as well as impressions of places, rough estimates of size and location, and a general sense of the connections between places.
