Historically, the larger the scale of the map (i.e. the smaller the area it depicted), the more random its orientation with 'best fit to the piece of paper' often seeming to be the determining factor.
American world maps tend to put the Americas in the centre with a repeat of Europe at the edges, whilst European maps tend to centre maps on the Greenwich meridian. Prior to Britain's Greenwich meridian becoming the internationally accepted zero degrees longitude, many countries had their own version; one of the last to be abandoned was the meridian of Paris. Britain's C19 pre-eminence allied with the British Empire resulting in it mapping more of the world thyan other countries enabled the Greenwich meridian to trump the competitors.
The perennial problem of depicting a spherical world on a flat sheet of paper concentionally maximises distortion at higher latitudes. Countries located in the further north have often adopted different projections to countries further south to ensure their latitude is accurately depicted. Famously, the USSR used a projection that made the USSR look much much larger than the USA. For some really wacky projections see
http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=76384 The highly variable scales that people keep in their heads have been studied by some geographers. The classic pattern is to commence by drawing one's neighbourhood at a large scale then add in an outline of the wider town at a smaller scale, then further out places at a yet smaller scale, the end result being a map of much or all of one's country with progressive enlargement the closer to the map maker's home. In parallel with this distortion is an increasing vagueness and error rate the further away from the map maker's home, and also a compression of proportion - e.g. a southerner will frequently compress Scotland's north-south dimension to around half its true proportion when attempting to draw an outline of the British Isles to a consistent scale. Those who have done Lejog will of course have acquired a more accurate impression of the relative north-south proportionss of England and Scotland!
Children's instinctively-drawn maps contain most of the above mentioned features and can bear comparison with medieval mapping.
