We present a benchmark for assessing the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to discern intercardinal directions between geographic locations and apply it to three prominent LLMs: GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Llama-2. This benchmark specifically evaluates whether LLMs exhibit a hierarchical spatial bias similar to humans, where judgments about individual locations' spatial relationships are influenced by the perceived relationships of the larger groups that contain them. To investigate this, we formulated 14 questions focusing on well-known American cities. Seven questions were designed to challenge the LLMs with scenarios potentially influenced by the orientation of larger geographical units, such as states or countries, while the remaining seven targeted locations less susceptible to such hierarchical categorization. Among the tested models, GPT-4 exhibited superior performance with 55.3% accuracy, followed by GPT-3.5 at 47.3%, and Llama-2 at 44.7%. The models showed significantly reduced accuracy on tasks with suspected hierarchical bias. For example, GPT-4's accuracy dropped to 32.9% on these tasks, compared to 85.7% on others. Despite these inaccuracies, the models identified the nearest cardinal direction in most cases, suggesting associative learning, embodying human-like misconceptions. We discuss the potential of text-based data representing geographic relationships directly to improve the spatial reasoning capabilities of LLMs.

President Donald Trump is widely expected to sign his latest executive order Wednesday seriously restricting immigration and refugees from seven countries in the Middle East and Africa, five of which the U.S. bombed under the previous administration. Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump accused President Barack Obama of supporting liberal immigration and refugee policies that the Republican billionaire-turned-politician said threatened national security. Trump directed his anti-immigration rhetoric toward Mexico and the Middle East, particularly singling Muslims as targets for tough, new visa policies. While he at one time suggested implementing a ban on all Muslims, Trump has since said he would focus on several countries whose population he felt presented the greatest risk. The list of countries was confirmed by congressional aides and immigration experts who the new administration had briefed on the upcoming order, according to Reuters.