Aggregation presence & accuracy (1), shape (2), size (3) & colour (4). Presence & accuracy, shape, size and colour of drawn elements show “how well” the sketch maps were drawn. Until here, we tried to evaluate the influence of each criterion individually. However, aggregation of all criteria used for scoring the drawn elements can offer a more objective measure to compare the quality of sketch maps. Inherently, the quality of sketch maps reflects the performance of participants. We treated each four parameters as they have equal importance on overall performance of a participant, so that we assigned each parameter the same weight. Overall performance scores were calculated as the average of individual performances for four different groups (expert females, expert males, novice females and novice males) in a 0-100 scoring scale.
            Expertise. According to the aggregated analysis, the average score of experts was 71.8 (st. dev. 19.2) with a minimum of 39.9 and a maximum of 92.8, whereas it was 68.2 (st. dev.  19.1) with a minimum of 21.5 and a maximum of 92.2 for novices. The difference of 3.6% on expertise was not statistically significant, F(1,55)= 0.689, p=0.410). The findings correspond to what was found by Thorndyke and Stasz (1980) and also by Gilhooly et al. (1988) in their studies on experts and novices’ ability to learn and remember information presented via maps. As mentioned in literature review, learning and remembering a map feature more likely depends on the general map knowledge and map experience does not predict learning of planimetric information (Kulhavy and Stock, 1996). The original map shown to participants was a simplified 1:10k topographic map and did not contain any familiar places (or names) to eliminate or minimize the degree of familiarity. Thus, both experts and novices saw the map for the first time and we presume that the maplikeness of stimulus had a great influence on their map learning (study and recall) process. The more maplike a stimulus, the more likely it is that the participants consult their general map knowledge as they execute the memory task. Although the amount of information learned related to a map stimulus do not change much, the learning strategies of experts and novices may differ. For instance, drawing order may change which is a sign of how spatial information hierarchically constructed is.
More detailed findings point out expert females were the most successful ones overall with a score of 74.2. Expert females were followed by novice females (69.9), then expert males (69.3) and lastly novice males (66.5). However, as mentioned above, these slight differences were not significant and we can conclude that experts and novices show no difference in map learning, unless the stimulus requires specific map knowledge that only an expert possesses.
            Gender. The average score of females was 72.1 (st. dev. 18.7) with a minimum of 39.9 and a maximum of 92.8, whereas it was 67.9 (st. dev.  19.6) with a minimum of 21.5 and a maximum of 92.2 for males. Females outperformed males with a 4.1% difference and both expert and novice females were favored in their groups. However, these findings stemmed out of little differences in the performances and they were not significant F(1,55)=0.942, p=0.336).
Lastly, conducting two-way ANOVA showed that there was no statistically significant interaction between the effects of gender and expertise on drawing map elements, F(1,55)= 0.029, p=0.866).

Eye tracking

It can be clearly seen from the focus map of all participants that users’ gaze activity reflects the main structuring elements of the map stimulus (Figure 14). When visually interpreted, focus map highlighted the main road construction, water bodies and large settlements belonging to the stimulus. Because of the data collection issues (e.g. ET calibration, low tracking ratio), two recordings were discarded from the ET data (in total 54 participants).