The Micronesians navigate with the help of compass bearings determined by the stars. When travelling from one island to another, in addition to the bearing to the island they are going to, they also use the changing bearing to a reference island to the side of the straight line between start and end of the trip.
A western researcher who talked to a navigator plotted the bearings to such a reference island from both the start and the end island and determined that the reference island must be at the intersection of these bearings. The Micronesian navigator didn't understand a thing. Seeing the whole thing from a birds eye view point was completely foreign to his way of thinking.
So, visualizing terrain in maps drawn from above is not necessarily what people do. It's quite a big step in abstraction.
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