ABSTRACT This article examined people’s spatial memory and navigation performance when they learned an environmental route using a smartphone map and a paper map. Our results showed that the use of a smartphone map impaired spatial learning and knowledge acquisition. Specifically, participants learned a route less accurately when they used a smartphone map than when using a paper map, revealed by a

ABSTRACT When conveying information about routes to follow in complex environments, human route-givers adapt to route-receivers’ familiarity with the environments in their choice of landmarks. Meanwhile, as route-givers themselves have experienced the environments within a social role, the landmarks they select may also differ significantly. This research investigated how these two factors influence

ABSTRACT Despite the increased research interest in wayfinding assistance systems, research on the appropriate point in time or space to automatically present a route instruction remains a desideratum. We address this research gap by reporting on the results of an outdoor, within-subject design wayfinding study ( N=52). Participants walked two different routes for which they requested spoken, landmark-based

ABSTRACT Detecting spatial relationships between objects depicted in an image is an important sub-task in vision and language understanding. Its practical use lies in visual discourse when referring to objects by their relationship in context of others and finds application in higher level tasks such as visual question answering and image description generation. Presumably, the selection of spatial

ABSTRACT The goal of this paper is to offer an analysis of urbanonyms, names for urban places, and show how this analysis can inform a conceptual taxonomy of urban places via the cultural lens of language. To reach this goal, the paper offers a classification of Italian urbanonyms (e.g., Via Nazionale “National Street”) based on data extraction from the Pagine Gialle directory, and a taxonomy of place

ABSTRACT During evacuation, individual navigation behavior is often dictated by the legibility of evacuation signs and the environmental setting itself. People tend to follow previously-used and known routes (to retrace) rather than follow evacuation signage. This has proven undesirable, even fatal, in emergencies and such behavior calls for a better understanding of the influencing factors. This contribution

ABSTRACT The topography of the land provides a suite of spatial information for navigation. In an outdoor field experiment, we examined terrain slant as a nonvisual cue. Without being told which cue to use, blindfolded, sighted participants completed a place-learning task in a flat and a slanted site. Errors were significantly smaller in the slanted site. Furthermore, performance in the slanted – but

ABSTRACT Limited hardware processing capacities and network bandwidth constrain the quality and quantity of photogrammetrically derived 3D terrain models that users can effectively visualize. In the present study, we examined what graphical level of detail (LOD) is sufficient to support effective spatial localization and orientation in 3D renderings of large-scale environments. We developed an interactive

ABSTRACT As indoor wayfinding can be very challenging, adapted systems, which adapt the route instruction type, are being developed to facilitate more supportive indoor route guidance. In this study, such a system has been developed based on the results of an online survey. This adapted system was compared with a non-adapted system by use of eye tracking, position tracking, an orientation test and

ABSTRACT Architects speak of space and place using terms such as enclosure or privacy. These terms imply certain patterns of use and inhabitation. Spatial qualities in this study are the terms used to describe experiential qualities, encapsulated descriptions of the geometric configuration and their relationships to the building user. To demonstrate how architects might computationally describe various

ABSTRACT Reorientation depends greatly on the perceived geometric information, which constantly changes during navigation in urban environments. Environmental novelty, as a driver of exploratory behavior, is likely to engender this spatial Aha! moment. The paper investigates the contribution of two qualitatively different types of novelty, corresponding to distinct visuospatial cues: (a) situations

ABSTRACT Navigation is an essential ability for mobile agents to be completely autonomous and able to perform complex actions. However, the problem of navigation for agents with limited (or no) perception of the world, or devoid of a fully defined motion model, has received little attention from research in AI and Robotics. One way to tackle this problem is to use guided navigation, in which other

ABSTRACT Drawing sketch maps is one of the most widely used tools for observation recording in community mapping. However, because sketches are not to scale and features are not precisely located, they are not spatially accurate. With this in mind, consider an important question. Can the use of sketch maps in a community mapping lead to an acceptable result? This article addresses this question by

ABSTRACT This study aimed to understand whether or not computer models of saliency could explain landmark saliency. An online survey was conducted and participants were asked to watch videos from a spatial navigation video game (Sea Hero Quest). Participants were asked to pay attention to the environments within which the boat was moving and to rate the perceived saliency of each landmark. In addition

ABSTRACT Spatial adaptation is the process of adjusting one’s mental representations for a task, so that spatial details necessary for performing the task are captured in the representations, whereas irrelevant details are ignored. We believe this process plays a critical role both in spatial ability tests and in STEM domains because it produces problem-tailored representations that can facilitate

ABSTRACT The study aimed to examine the relationship between the practice of judo and different spatial abilities. Several individual measures, including spatial tasks and questionnaires on wayfinding inclinations, were administered to 52 judo experts and 45 non-athlete controls. After learning by navigating in a virtual environment, participants were measured on their route retracing and shortcut

ABSTRACT We examine whether acquiring left/right language affects children’s ability to take a non-egocentric left-right perspective. In Experiment 1, we tested 10–13 year-old Tseltal (Mayan) and Spanish-speaking children from the same community on a task that required they retrieve a coin they previously saw hidden in one of four boxes to the left/right/front/back of a toy sheep after the entire array

ABSTRACT Although immersive virtual reality is attractive to users, we know relatively little about whether higher immersion levels increase or decrease spatial learning outcomes. In addition, questions remain about how different approaches to travel within a virtual environment affect spatial learning. In this paper, we investigated the role of immersion (desktop computer versus HTC Vive) and teleportation

ABSTRACT Daniel Montello’s commentary on our article “Subjective Disorientation as a Metacognitive Feeling” raises many interesting points. In this response, we hope to show that what might at first seem like strong disagreements are for the most part minor issues and that the disagreements that remain are of the fruitful kind that encourage further discussion and research.

ABSTRACT There is a large body of literature on disorientation, ranging from behavioral studies to the analysis of search and rescue operations. However, the subjective side of disorientation remains insufficiently explored and, as a result, there is no unified account of the phenomenon. A working characterization of disorientation is a first step in the direction of this unified account. Through the

ABSTRACT Vertical enclosure is incapable of describing the permeation of landscape space enclosures. Physical and visual enclosures are identified to compensate for enclosure cognition inadequacies. Physical enclosures reflect the restriction of behavior, and visual enclosures embody the viewshed extension range. An identification method is proposed and implemented using point cloud data. Multiple

ABSTRACT Nearness expressions such as “near” are context-dependent spatial relations and are subject to the context variability effect. Depending on the provided context, “near” has a different semantic extension. We perform a literature review to identify the effect of context on “near”. To integrate the insights from different disciplines, we apply Turney’s contextualization framework which distinguishes

ABSTRACT In this commentary on Fernandez Velasco and Casati’s “Subjective Disorientation as a Metacognitive Feeling” in this journal, I take issue with their distinction between “the objective condition of being lost and the subjective condition of disorientation”. Instead, I argue that being lost is geographic disorientation, and in all cases, it depends on a person’s subjective awareness that they

ABSTRACT Mirrored stimuli in chronometric mental rotation tests cannot be rotated into congruence and are typically discarded from analysis. We present a novel design using three figures such that congruence is achieved for all trials. For design construction, we consider the geometrical properties of rotation and mirroring. We have experimentally tested the approach with forty-one German sport students

ABSTRACT We examined how 4- to 5-year-old children and adults use perceptual structure (visible midline boundaries) to visually scale distance. Participants completed scaling and no scaling tasks using learning and test mats that were 16 and 64 inches. No boundaries were present in Experiment 1. Children and adults had more difficulty in the scaling than no scaling task when the test mat was 64 inches

ABSTRACT Children’s memory responses to a target location in a homogenous space change from being biased toward the midline of the space to being biased away. According to Dynamic Field Theory (DFT), improvement in the perception of the midline symmetry axis contributes to this transition. Simulations of DFT using a 3-year-old parameter setting showed that memory biases at intermediate target locations

ABSTRACT The bulk of the research in spatial reorientation has studied how visual cues guide behavior. This project aims to explore the role of auditory cues. Using a find-and-replace paradigm in a circular search space, blindfolded sighted participants were able to reorient successfully using only auditory landmarks, albeit with errors larger than those found in visual-based reorientation. Importantly

ABSTRACT Place is a central concept in geography and a topic of interest in the social sciences, urban planning, architecture, and most recently in information science. The notion of place has therefore been studied with different foci of interest. Consequently, heterogeneous terminologies, conceptualizations, models, and ontologies have been proposed to capture this elusive concept. Yet these studies

ABSTRACT Using Space Syntax techniques, we examined the relationship between environmental properties and spatial memory following navigation in a virtual environment. Participants navigated two main routes as well as two connector routes, memorizing landmark locations in the main routes. Memory was then examined through a pointing task and a model-building task. Participants pointed more accurately

(2019). List of Reviewers. Spatial Cognition & Computation: Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 359-360.

ABSTRACT Knots can be found and used in a variety of situations in the 3D world, such as in vines, in the DNA, polymer chains, electrical wires, in mountaineering, seamanship and when ropes or other flexible objects are involved for exerting forces and holding objects in place. Research on knots as topological entities has contributed with a number of findings, not only of interest to pure mathematics

ABSTRACT The ability to mentally represent spatial information is a fundamental cognitive process. To many people, this process feels a bit like visual perception, hence the term ‘spatial visualization’. In this paper, we describe a method for measuring the accuracy of spatial visualization, specifically visualization of a complex path in imaginary space. A critical feature of this method (called Path

ABSTRACT Two experiments examined cue reliance and risk-taking during desktop virtual wayfinding, and how they might be modulated by personality traits and external stressors. Participants navigated a series of virtual buildings and we manipulated the strength of probabilistic cues available to guide turn decisions. Navigators frequently discounted probabilistic cues and instead took risks, particularly

ABSTRACT We study the role of place and region names in the formation of spatial hierarchies. Representations were probed behaviorally, i.e., by choices between two equidistant routes differing only in the number of regions they touched. Routes crossing fewer region boundaries are preferred over routes crossing more region boundaries. Visual landmark objects from a common semantic category placed in

ABSTRACT The influence of stress states on cognition is widely recognized. However, the manner in which stress affects survey knowledge acquisition is still unresolved. For the present study, we investigated whether survey knowledge acquisition during a stressful task (i.e., under time pressure) is more accurate for the mental representation of global or local landmarks. Participants navigated through

ABSTRACT Current topological and geometrical distances in Space Syntax are based on the premise that each change of direction along a path is a mental cost because one loses orientation. This paper proposes to extend the analysis to the case in which esthetic and variety, rather than orientation, are the key elements of street selection. It is widely recognized that most people are attracted to curvy

ABSTRACT The current study investigates the coordination of signs and eye gaze during depictions of directions and spatial scenes by fluent and second language (L2) signers of Norwegian Sign Language. First, findings show that fluent and L2 signers make different choices regarding the perspective they use to depict spatial scenes. Second, there is variation within and across groups in relation to how

ABSTRACT The involvement of motor processes in mental rotation is experience-dependent: different levels of expertise in sensorimotor interactions lead to different strategies in mental rotation. In the present study, wrestlers, gymnasts, and nonathletes physically rotated objects that were either light (wooden) or heavy (lead) but otherwise having the same sizes and shapes. They then performed a mental

ABSTRACT Humans solve spatial and abstract problems more easily if these can be visualized and/or physically manipulated. We analyze the domain of geometric problem solving from a cognitive perspective and identify several levels of domain abstraction that interact in the problem solving process. We discuss the roles of physical manifestations of spatial configurations, their manipulation, and their

ABSTRACT People often communicate with reference to informally agreed places, such as “the city centre”. However, views of the spatial extent of such areas may vary, resulting in imprecise regions. We compare perceptions of Sheffield’s City Centre from a street survey to extents derived from various web-based sources. Such automated approaches have advantages of speed, cost and repeatability. We show

ABSTRACT We present a detailed analysis of a widely used assay in human spatial cognition, the judgments of relative direction (JRD) task. We conducted three experiments involving virtual navigation interspersed with the JRD task, and included confidence judgments and map drawing as additional metrics. We also present a technique for assessing the similarity of the cognitive representations underlying

ABSTRACT Movement experts tend to outperform non-experts on some tasks of spatial ability, suggesting that movement experts possess enhanced spatial-cognitive abilities, which may be developed over years of practice. In the current study, movement experts (dancers and athletes) and non-experts completed one verbal working memory task and two spatial working memory tasks—a traditional Corsi block-tapping

(2018). List of reviewers. Spatial Cognition & Computation: Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 341-341.

ABSTRACT This article reviews grammatical formalisms that are capable of supporting spatial specification and reasoning, or spatial-enabled grammars, and their wide range of applications. The review takes two typical grammars, i.e., shape grammar and spatial graph grammar, as concrete representatives to consider connectivity and spatial relations in the parsing and generating processes. This article

(2018). Review of “Space and spatial cognition: a multidisciplinary perspective”. Spatial Cognition & Computation: Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 257-258.

ABSTRACT I apply my proposed modification of Soar/Spatial/Visual System and Kosslyn’s (1983) computational operations on images to problems within a 2 × 2 taxonomy that classifies research according to whether the coding involves static or dynamic relations within an object or between objects (Newcombe & Shipley, 2015). I then repeat this analysis for problems that are included in mathematics and science

(2018). Perception, cognition and reasoning about shadows. Spatial Cognition & Computation: Vol. 18, Perception, cognition and reasoning about shadows, pp. 78-85.

ABSTRACT Hippocampal place cells are thought to form the neural substrate of a global cognitive map. However, in multicompartment mazes, these cells exhibit locally repeating representations, undermining the global cognitive map view of place cells. This phenomenon appears to be related to the repetitive layout of these mazes, but still no hypothesis adequately explains it. Here, we use a boundary

ABSTRACT We present an experimental investigation of the influence of language on spatial memory. German and English differ in how they encode the axial position (standing vs. lying) of an inanimate figure object which is supported by a ground object. In a series of four experiments, we show that German and English speakers’ ability to detect changes in axial position during recognition memory tasks

ABSTRACT Fictive motion in language (as in “the ridge went north”) is claimed to reflect the attention focus of the observer on the extension and spatial layout of an entity. This paper investigates fictive motion in alpine narratives, which describe the experience of moving in a very specifically structured space. We examine space properties that are highlighted through fictive motion in this specific

ABSTRACT This article addresses the topic of conceptual representation of shadows. We analyze several examples of contemporary imagery, taken from advertising and cartooning, to shed light on the way shadow depictions are used as rhetorical devices. Instead of being inserted as a natural phenomenon, rhetorical shadows invite the construction of meaning, and instead of being a mere natural companion

ABSTRACT Stops along taxi trajectories, such as picking up and dropping off passengers, are spatially clustered and related to certain attributes of places where stops are made. To detect the hidden knowledge regarding these places, this article examines the semantics of massive taxi stops in a large city. Each taxi trajectory is modeled as a series of sequential semantic stops labeled by street names

ABSTRACT A new type of area of interest (AOI) termed “choice zones” is proposed, that is relevant for eye tracking research in the built environment. Choice zones are an ex ante measure; this is in contrast to many existing definitions of AOIs which are data-driven. Choice zones are defined algorithmically using space-geometric parameters. The validity of the concept is tested against fixation data

ABSTRACT Categorical bias in location memory in geometric spaces is well established. The present study assessed the presence of the bias in locating eyes in images of human faces. Participants were presented with digital faces and indicated the position of one of the eyes in both upright and inverted orientations. Biases resulted from participants using multiple sources of accessible information.

ABSTRACT Research on location memory suggests that integration of separate sources of information does not occur when recalling the position of a common target object. In a relatively simple task, previous research shows no observable benefit from holding two spatial memories compared to one. It has been suggested that exclusively utilizing only one of two memories may account for this finding. The

ABSTRACT The present study investigated cognitive map development in multilevel built environments. Three experiments were conducted in complex virtual buildings to examine the effects of five between-floor structural factors that may impede the accuracy of humans’ ability to build multilevel cognitive maps. Results from Experiments 1 and 2 (of three experiments) revealed that difficulties in developing

ABSTRACT This study employed an information accumulation model of choice reaction times to investigate alignment effects in mental representations of maps. University students studied a map from a single orientation (with north at the top). In a subsequent two-choice reaction time task, the students’ spatial knowledge of the map was assessed employing spatial left/right judgments, which were made from

(2017). Reviewers of Volume 17. Spatial Cognition & Computation: Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 338-338.

(2017). EOV Editorial Board. Spatial Cognition & Computation: Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. ebi-ebi.

ABSTRACT How does gesturing during route learning relate to subsequent spatial performance? We examined the relationship between gestures produced spontaneously while studying route directions and spatial representations of the navigated environment. Participants studied route directions, then navigated those routes from memory in a virtual environment, and finally had their memory of the environment