Residents and Tourists Picture the Same Village in Strikingly Different Mental Maps

In the border village of Shiwei, deep in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, two very different mental pictures of the same place coexist side by side. New research published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications shows that the people who live in this Russian-flavored frontier settlement and the tourists who flock to it construct fundamentally different cognitive maps of their surroundings, a divergence with real consequences for how rural destinations are planned and managed. The study, led by Yuhui Xu and Chang an of Inner Mongolia Normal University together with colleagues, offers one of the most methodologically detailed attempts yet to quantify how spatial imagery differs between host communities and visitors at the scale of a single village.

Spatial imagery, as the researchers define it, refers to people’s experiential understanding of the environment around them. It is the mental representation that accumulates as individuals walk streets, pass landmarks, and navigate routines, and it shapes everything from wayfinding to emotional attachment to place. For rural tourism destinations, the team argues, understanding how residents and tourists each picture the landscape is not an academic luxury. When the two groups’ images of a place diverge sharply, planning decisions based on one perspective can quietly alienate the other, undermining the coordinated development that destination managers seek.

To capture these divergent pictures, the researchers built a theoretical framework organized around three nested levels: spatial imagery elements, spatial imagery structure, and spatial imagery pattern. The element level asks which components of the environment, such as paths, landmarks, regions, nodes, and edges in the tradition of urban image analysis, dominate people’s mental representations. The structure level examines how those components are organized cognitively, from fragmented single impressions to richly sequenced networks. The pattern level maps where imagery concentrates in physical space, revealing the hotspots that anchor each group’s collective imagination.

The empirical work combined qualitative and quantitative techniques in a mixed-methods design. The team conducted interviews with residents and visitors, asked participants to draw cognitive maps of the village, and then subjected the resulting data to spatial interpolation and geographic information system analysis. This combination allowed the researchers to move beyond anecdote: rather than simply reporting that residents and tourists feel differently about Shiwei, they could locate those differences on the ground and characterize their geometry.

The first major finding concerns elements. Residents primarily organize their spatial imagery through region and path elements, emphasizing spatial continuity, familiarity, and daily practicality. Their mental village is stitched together from the routes they walk to work, the fields they tend, and the neighborhoods they inhabit, forming a coherent fabric of lived experience. Tourists, by contrast, rely mainly on landmark elements to perceive the village, focusing on symbolic uniqueness and tourism functionality. For visitors, Shiwei is a constellation of photogenic highlights, distinctive buildings, and service points, each standing out against a background that remains largely undifferentiated.

The second finding concerns structure, and here the contrast is equally stark. Residents frequently employ high-level sequential cognitive maps, meaning their representations link locations into ordered chains and networks that reflect the temporal rhythm of daily life. Tourists primarily utilize low-level monolithic cognitive maps, in which individual attractions are stored as isolated units rather than connected sequences. This difference in cognitive architecture suggests that residents possess a deeply integrated understanding of village space, while tourists operate with a more fragmented, checklist-like image assembled around discrete destinations.

The third finding concerns pattern, and it is the most visually striking. When the researchers mapped the density of image hotspots across the village, residents’ hotspots exhibited an elliptical clustering pattern with a distribution described as dense in the north and sparse in the south. Tourists’ hotspots, by contrast, were distributed in multiple clusters concentrated in three main areas, forming an overall arc-shaped pattern. In other words, the resident image of Shiwei is a single continuous core weighted toward one end of the settlement, while the tourist image is a broken ring of attraction clusters strung along the village’s most visited axis.

These results carry practical weight for rural tourism planning. If visitor imagery clusters in a few landmark-dense zones while resident imagery spreads along paths and regions that visitors barely register, then infrastructure investments, signage, and route design based solely on tourist maps will neglect the connective tissue that makes the village function for its inhabitants. Conversely, development that respects only resident routines may fail to channel tourist flows in ways that disperse economic benefit. The authors position their framework as a diagnostic tool for identifying such mismatches before they harden into planning conflicts.

The study is also notable for its methodological ambition. Analyzing spatial imagery at the micro-scale of a single village required the team to adapt cognitive mapping techniques, traditionally used for cities, to a setting where the entire imageable environment can be walked in minutes. By pairing interview data with spatial interpolation and GIS analysis, the researchers demonstrated that qualitative mental representations can be converted into quantifiable spatial patterns, an approach they describe as a methodologically rigorous attempt at this scale. The work was supported by multiple grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and related programs, reflecting sustained institutional investment in rural spatial research.

Shiwei itself, a village known for its Russian heritage architecture and borderland scenery, is an apt laboratory for these questions, since its tourism economy depends precisely on the symbolic distinctiveness that dominates tourist imagery. As rural destinations across China and beyond grapple with balancing community life and visitor economies, the study’s central lesson travels well beyond one village: the same landscape is genuinely different places in different minds, and sustainable planning begins by mapping both.

Subject of Research: Differences in spatial imagery between residents and tourists in a rural tourism village

Article Title: Differences in spatial imagery from the dual perspectives of residents and tourists: A case study of Shiwei village

Article References: Differences in spatial imagery from the dual perspectives of residents and tourists: A case study of Shiwei village. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41599-026-09250-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41599-026-09250-0

Keywords: spatial imagery, cognitive maps, rural tourism, Shiwei village, Inner Mongolia, GIS analysis, spatial planning, landmarks, tourist perception, resident perception, destination development, human geography