Abstract: Spatial cognition affects human spatial behaviors. The study of cognitive process is of great significance in map and navigation design, geography teaching and so on. Traditional cognitive experiments mostly use maps (including paper maps and electronic maps, street view maps, etc.) and real scenes as experimental environments to study the psychological process of subjects’ reading maps and the guidance effect of maps in real geographic environment. This paper puts forward the concept of earth view, that is, taking the third person reading scene of Google Earth as the experimental environment, studying how the candidates orientate and locate the places of countries or regions and search for the target on the Earth without fixed axis through certain operations on Google Earth, and analyzing the cognitive process of the whole earth sphere. By visualizing the process of reading the Earth with the gaze point data recorded by eye tracker and analyzing the process of thinking, it is found that on the earth, the target searching process, which combines relative position judgment and orientation positioning, is the comprehensive presentation of construction process about the candidates’ Earth view.

Key words: earth view, eye movement analysis, spatial cognition, digital Earth