Human multi-modal spatial cognition, spatial orientation, and navigation Research Papers

There is a substantial and growing interest in immersive virtual spaces as contexts for 21st century skills like problem solving, communication, and collaboration. However, little consideration has been given to the ways in which users become proficient in these environments or what types of target behaviors are associated with 21st century skills. As a result, this exploratory study (n = 16) applied systematic direct observations to examine differences in expert and novice behaviors as they interact within the World of Warcraft (WoW). Trend analyses showed clear differences associated with the user’s level of expertise. In addition, significant differences were found in variables associated with social and spatial attunement to WoW across three points in time. Based on these findings, researchers discuss implications associated with 21st century skills, broader educational applications of these findings, and future avenues for research.

- by and +2
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- Cognitive Science, Human Computer Interaction, 21st Century Literacies, Game studies

Persistence and change are necessary for the stability and development of both the human individual and the human society, since the beginnings of human history. Man needs a static framework, which, related to his self-awareness, defines a topocentric system of perception, evaluation, order, and meaning. He also requires a dynamic impetus, which allows exceeding the limits of special world views, shifting of perspectives and transformations of individual as well as social approaches to life. Travelling especially helped to broaden man’s horizon and mind. Accross cultures voyages guided by the skies are linked with practical concepts of exploring and domesticating time and space, but also figuratively with the life’s journey and with other worlds, being expressed by mythic, ritual and later scientific language.

- by Michael Rappenglueck
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- Evolutionary Biology, Archaeology, Classical Archaeology, Egyptology

Multimodality studies consider the ways semiotic resources besides language can facilitate “meaning making” in communicative situations. Alison Gibbons and Wolfgang Hallet, among others, adopt multimodality studies as a framework for literary analysis, calling attention to a growing corpus of novels in which various design features (such as layout) and semiotic systems (such as pictures or maps) offer experiences that are not linguistically shaped. They observe that these additional modal and material resources can strengthen or weaken what readers infer from the written words in the novels. This article, however, traces the cognitive and perceptual processes triggered by the use of handwriting as a form of inscription in J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s novel S. (2013) to highlight how even the presentation of language in multi-modal literature can engender experiences that exceed linguistic comprehension. Thus the article argues that if studies of multimodality in literature intend to subvert “language-based” thinking, they need to move past the preoccupation with meaning making and also recognize those embodied experiences afforded by literary texts that do not seem to significantly modify the linguistic meaning.

- by Torsa Ghosal
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- Media and Cultural Studies, Avant-garde writing, Cognition, Typography

The development of teaching methods adapted to the new European Higher
Education Area requires a review and updating of content and learning methodologies. In
this sense, our work addresses the task of studying a learning environment based on new
Information Technology and Communication in the geographic area: the INSPIRE geoportal
(Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe: SDI). The cartography, maps and street plan
are an activity field where spatial orientation abilities are used. The aim of this research ...

Try this simple experiment: close your eyes tightly, stand up, and walk to the other side of the room and back.You have just simulated for yourself what it is like to be blind. Well, not quite: there are several importantfactors missing. Firstly, you knew all along that you could open your eyes at any minute if you ran into trouble(e.g., a large hard obstacle). A blind person does not have that option for recovering from a mistake.Secondly, you almost certainly used your visually derived mental 'map' of the room's layout to guide you.Think how much harder it would have been to do the same thing in an unfamiliar room. Thirdly, you drew on aset of spatial concepts and orientation skills developed across your life-span that involved vision as a major unifying sense; the very first time you, as an infant, watched your hand as you reached out for an object, youwere already learning about space through vision.Even this experiment hardly brings you close to the everyday experience of someone who is totally,congenitally blind. Such a person has no visual memories of particular spaces, and has had no direct visual input into the development of their spatial understanding in general. Their experience of space comes fromhearing, touch and movement, and yet they can engage in pretty much all the activities that a sighted personcan. How is this possible when we, as sighted people, place so much importance on visual experience in our lives? Through theories and research in cognitive psychology and behavioural geography, this chapter willexplore the way(s) in which blind people experience and represent space. The first section will trace thehistory of thinking on the subject, the second will assess current work while the third will look to the future.

- by Simon Ungar
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- Spatial cognition, Blindness, Haptics, Haptic Perception

During the last decades, many cognitive architectures (CAs) have been realized adopting different assumptions about the organization and the representation of their knowledge level. Some of them (e.g. SOAR [35]) adopt a classical symbolic approach, some (e.g. LEABRA[48]) are based on a purely con-nectionist model, while others (e.g. CLARION [59]) adopt a hybrid approach combining connectionist and symbolic representational levels. Additionally, some attempts (e.g. biSOAR) trying to extend the representational capacities of CAs by integrating diagrammatical representations and reasoning are also available [34]. In this paper we propose a reflection on the role that Conceptual Spaces, a framework developed by Peter Gärdenfors [24] more than fifteen years ago, can play in the current development of the Knowledge Level in Cognitive Systems and Architectures. In particular, we claim that Conceptual Spaces offer a lingua franca that allows to unify and generalize many aspects of the symbolic, sub-symbolic and diagrammatic approaches (by overcoming some of their typical problems) and to integrate them on a common ground. In doing so we extend and detail some of the arguments explored by Gärdenfors [23] for defending the need of a conceptual, intermediate, representation level between the symbolic and the sub-symbolic one. In particular we focus on the advantages offered by Conceptual Spaces (w.r.t. symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches) in dealing with the problem of compositionality of representations based on typicality traits. Additionally, we argue that Conceptual Spaces could offer a unifying framework for interpreting many kinds of diagrammatic and analogical representations. As a consequence, their adoption could also favor the integration of diagrammatical representation and reasoning in CAs.

- by Antonio Lieto and +1
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- Robotics, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence

This paper reports a study of how familiarity and gender may influence the frames of reference used in memory to represent a real-world regularly shaped environment. Familiar and unfamiliar participants learned the locations of three triads of buildings by walking on a path which encircled each triad. Then they were shown with maps reproducing these triads at five different orientations (from 0° to 180°) and had to judge whether each triad represented correctly the relative positions between the buildings. Results showed that unfamiliar participants performed better when the orientation of triads was closer to the learning perspective (0° and 45°) and corresponded to front rather than to back positions. Instead, familiar participants showed a facilitation for triads oriented along orthogonal axes (0°–180°, 90°) and no difference between front and back positions. These findings suggested that locations of unfamiliar buildings were mentally represented in terms of egocentric frames of reference; instead, allocentric frames of reference defined by the environment were used when the environment was familiar. Finally, males were more accurate and faster than females, and this difference was particularly evident in participants unfamiliar with the environment.

- by Tina Iachini and +1
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- Cognitive Psychology, Environmental Psychology, Spatial cognition, Spatial Memory

Three experiments investigated whether the similarity of relational structures influences the interpretation of spatial representations. Adults were shown diagrams of hand gestures paired with simple statements and asked to judge the meaning of new gestures. In Experiment 1 the gestures were paired with active declarative statements. In Experiment 2, the gestures were paired with conjunctive and disjunctive relations.

Wolf Häfele, a physicist who held several responsible positions and is at present Director of the Nuclear Research Center of Jülich, Germany, has always tried to see the historical development and the present developments of science and technology in perspective and particularly so in the fields of energy and environment. Karl Ulmer and Werner Stegmaier as philosophers have always understood philosophy as the principal way to orient one's life in this world. The dialogue of these men makes their perspectives to coincide in a multidimensional way. Their method is to envisage a sequence of levels of abstraction in their respective fields thus resulting in an understanding of the conditions of the future. The leading notions of this understanding are "individuum" and "pattern". This leads the authors to address the overwhelming issue of our days: complexity. What evolves is the expectation of innovations, new possibilities for living, and this includes new yardsticks for the understanding of life. It comprises changes of our present scheme of civilisation, our understanding of ethics, and, perhaps, happiness.

- by Werner Stegmaier
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- Physics, Philosophy, Interdisciplinarity, Abstraction
- by Mark A Schmuckler
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- Perceptual Development, Motor Development, Perception-Action, Self-Knowledge

Grammatical aspect is known to shape event understanding. However, little is known about how it interacts with other important temporal information, such as recent and distant past. The current work uses computer-mouse tracking (Spivey et al.,2005) to explore the interaction of aspect and temporal context. Participants in our experiment listened to past motion event descriptions that varied according to aspect (simple past,past progressive) and temporal distance (recent past,distant past) while viewing scenes with paths and implied destinations. Participants used a computer mouse to place characters into the scene to match event descriptions. Our results indicated that aspect and temporal context interact in interesting ways. When aspect placed emphasis on the ongoing details of the event and the temporal context was recent( thus, making fine details available in memory), this match between conditions elicited smoother and faster computer mouse movements than when conditions mismatched. Likewise, when aspect placed emphasis on the less detailed end state of the event and temporal context was in the distant past (thus,making fine details less available), this match between conditions also elicited smoother and faster computer mouse movements.

- by Teenie Matlock
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- Cognitive Science, Languages and Linguistics, Semantics, Cognitive Semantics
- by David Seamon
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- Visual Studies, Architecture, Spatial cognition, Space and Place

The semiotic analysis of Tea Ceremony (Japan) rituals reveals complex manipulations of objects between participants. Such operations must be referred to the oriented bodies of the said participants, and the objects themselves appear to be oriented in an anthropomorphic way. The coordination of movements imposes the recognition of three orientational referential systems. In semantic terms, such reference systems are related to enuncive and enunciative acts.

- by Manar HAMMAD
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- Semiotics, Anthropology, Architecture, Anthropology of Japan
- by Tore Nielsen
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- Neuroscience, Perception, Consciousness (Psychology), Sleep Physiology

The current study applied a rodent-based Morris water maze (MWM) protocol to an investigation of search performance differences between young and older adult humans. To investigate whether similar age-related decline in search performance could be seen in humans based on the rodent-based protocol, we implemented a virtual MWM (vMWM) that has characteristics similar to those of the MWM used in previous studies of spatial learning in mice. Through the use of a proximity to platform measure, robust differences were found between healthy young and older adults in search performance. After dividing older adults into good and poor performers based on a median-split of their corrected cumulative proximity (CCProx) values, the age effects in place learning were found to be largely related to search performance differences between the young and poor-performing older adults. When compared to the young, poor-performing older adults exhibited significantly higher proximity values in 83% of 24 place trials and overall in the probe trials that assessed spatial learning in the absence of the hidden platform. In contrast, good-performing older adults exhibited patterns of search performance that were comparable to that of the younger adults in most place and probe trials. Taken together, our findings suggest that the low search accuracy in poor-performing older adults stemmed from potential differences in strategy selection, differences in assumptions or expectations of task demands, as well as possible underlying functional and/or structural changes in the brain regions involved in vMWM search performance. [To access the paper, click on the URLs]

- by Jimmy Y Zhong, PhD and +2
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- Neuroscience, Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Perception

The aim of this study was to assess the impact of a wind farm on individuals by means of an audio-visual methodology that tried to simulate biologically plausible individual–environment interactions. To disentangle the effects of auditory and visual components on cognitive performances and subjective evaluations, unimodal (Audio or Video) and bimodal (Audio + Video) approaches were compared. Participants were assigned to three experimental conditions that reproduced a wind farm by means of an immersive virtual reality system: bimodal condition, reproducing scenarios with both acoustic and visual stimuli; unimodal visual condition, with only visual stimuli; unimodal auditory condition, with only auditory stimuli. While immersed in the virtual scenarios, participants performed tasks assessing verbal fluency, short-term verbal memory, backward counting, and distance estimations (egocentric: how far is the turbine from you?; allocentric: how far is the turbine from the target?). Afterwards, participants reported their degree of visual and noise annoyance. The results revealed that the presence of a visual scenario as compared to the only availability of auditory stimuli may exert a negative effect on resource-demanding cognitive tasks but a positive effect on perceived noise annoyance. This supports the idea that humans perceive the environment holistically and that auditory and visual features are processed in close interaction.

- by Francesco Ruotolo and +1
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- Landscape Ecology, Applied Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Ergonomics

Survey organizations rely on data that must be collected in the field. In such situations, a field worker makes decisions that are influenced both by their location and the nature of the data they are collecting. As we understand more about how individual differences affect surveyors, we are better able to tailor tools to these differences. Individual differences research has shown that spatial ability is a primary factor of computer user performance. Surveyors such as those deployed by the United States Census Bureau must make decisions that are dependent on geographic position and orientation, further relying on spatial ability. Our prior research has tied survey performance during an address verification task to spatial ability and highlights the differences of approach between participants of high and low spatial ability classifications. The current work examines the impacts of spatial ability with regard to decision-making during an address verification task.

- by Rich Furman
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- Creative Writing, Creative Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Creative Nonfiction

Egocentric spatial ability (measured by perspective-taking tests) has been shown to be important in various fields including navigation. A 2D perspective-taking task (PTA) has been shown to modestly predicted navigational performance (Kozhevnikov et al., 2006) but virtual reality (VR) research had shown that VR encouraged egocentric processing (Kozhevnikov, 2007). The primary aim of this thesis was to ascertain if a VRPTA could predict navigational performance. The secondary aim was to investigate if prior navigational training could enhance performance on egocentric spatial ability tasks. In the study, trained and non-trained participants completed four visual-spatial ability tests (i.e. MRT, PFT, PTA and VRPTA) and three egocentric spatial updating navigational performance tasks. The findings were that VRPTA was the strongest predictor of navigational performance and that PTA did not account for any additional variance of navigational performance beyond VRPTA. These findings showed that immersive properties of VR make VRPTA a more robust assessment of egocentric spatial ability than non-immersive PTA. VRPTA could be used for assessing individuals for egocentric ability related vocations such as navigators, dentists and medical surgeons. Furthermore, the finding that trained and non-trained navigators did not defer on tasks showed that prior training did not improve egocentric spatial ability.

The U.S. Census Bureau hires thousands to verify addresses decennially in the United States, an endeavor that stands to benefit from a variety of tools. Software tailored to support location-based tasks constitutes one such tool. In the case of the Census Bureau, this software requires workflows to disposition residences and related location-based interests. As a first step in location-based software design, we aim to better understand how users with different cognitive abilities approach location-based tasks. This paper discusses an exploratory study in which college students were given a paper map and asked to verify a set of six residential addresses. This approach, as opposed to using a modern handheld device, allowed us to collect data unconstrained by a specific hardware or software configuration. The study methodology and results are discussed.

While robots are still absent from our homes, they have started to spread over battlefields. However, the military robots of today are mostly remotely controlled platforms, with no real autonomy. This paper will disclose the obstacles in implementing autonomy for such systems, by answering a technical question: “What level of autonomy is needed in military robots and how and when might it be achieved?”, followed by a techno-legal one; “How to implement the rules of humanitarian law within autonomous fighting robots, in order to allow their legal deployment?”
The first chapter scrutinizes the significance of autonomy in robots and the metrics used to quantify it, which were developed by the US Department of Defense.
The second chapter focuses on the autonomy of ‘state-of-the-art’ robots (e.g.; Google’s self-driving car, DARPA’s projects, etc) for navigation, ISR or lethal missions. Based on public information, we will get a hint of the architectures, the functioning, the thresholds and technical limitations of such systems. The bottleneck to a higher autonomy of robots seems to be their poor ‘perceptive intelligence’.
The last chapter looks to the requirements of humanitarian law (rules of ‘jus in bello’/rules of engagement) to the legal deployment of autonomous lethal robots on the battlefields. The legal and moral reasoning of human soldiers, complying with humanitarian law, is a complex cognitive process which must be emulated by autonomous robots that could make lethal decisions. However, autonomous completion of such ‘moral’ tasks by artificial agents is much more challenging than the autonomous implementation of other tasks, such as navigation, ISR or kinetic attacks.
Given the limits of current Artificial Intelligence, it is highly unlikely that robots will acquire such 'moral' capabilities anytime soon. Therefore, for the time being, the autonomous weapon systems might be legally deployed, but only in very particular circumstances, where the requirements of humanitarian law happen to be irrelevant.

"https://vimeo.com/fluxations/psfirstsoloside FluxNOISations solo from an improvised duet performed with FluxNoisations and circuit-bent radio (for front on view of the complete performance visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eBra9gd5QQ ) In this solo, Joshua B. Mailman: FluxNoisations (sounds of wood, metal, water, sandpaper, sticks, etc. and live computer graphics controlled through infrared camera motion-capture and sensor gloves) All sounds and graphics are generated in the moment of performance. The event includes improvised live computer graphics, a colorful spectacle projected on a large screen, controlled by spontaneous body- and hand-movements of Mailman, through his FluxNoisations interactive-dance system. Through this system, Mailman simultaneously generates and steers a stream of percussive-noise sound."

- by Joshua B Mailman
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- Computer Graphics, Human Computer Interaction, Musical Composition, Music Theory

Navigation systems are in common use by drivers and typically present information using either audio or visual representations. However, there are many pressures on the driver's cognitive systems in a car and navigational systems can add to this complexity. In this paper, we present two studies which investigated how vibro-tactile representations of navigational information, might be presented to the driver via the steering wheel to ameliorate this problem. Our results show that adding tactile information to existing audio, or particularly visual representations, can improve both driving performance and experience.

Human multi-modal spatial cognition, spatial orientation, and navigation Research Papers (original) (raw)