Shape, size and colour. From  Bertin's (1983) visual variables, besides location, shape, size and colour characteristics of drawn elements were ranked on a scale of 1-3 (1: incorrect, 2: partially correct, 3: correct) (\citealp{Billinghurst}). Here, we ignored the participant’s drawing ability and instead focused on how well the sketch map represented the area in the topographic map. For instance, linear objects such as roads and rivers should be illustrated as lines with varying the thicknesses and when individual roads connect, they should picture the overall road construction. Another logic should be followed for aggregation of areal objects such that the individual buildings can be grouped and drawn as a single element (in this case settlement), since we asked our participants to draw only the main structuring elements. Additionally, we took major shape characteristics of map elements into consideration. For instance, roads and railroads can be drawn as straight lines.
Figure 7 shows the shape scores of experts and males based on four main categories. Experts illustrated the shape of the map elements 7.5% better than novices did and a two-way ANOVA showed that this difference was not significant (F(1,55)= 3.822, p=0.056). Similar to presence and location, the biggest difference in performances of novices and experts occurred in settlements with 13.8%.