Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The effective control of attentional focus is an essential requirement in mental reasoning based on mental models and men tal images, as well as in the interaction with external diagrams. In this paper, we argue for spatial or ganization principles common to various mental subsystems that entail a non-centralistic con trol of focus. We give a brief overview of mental spatial rea soning and present a review of psy chological findings related to cognitive con trol. We review existing mod eling approaches that realize control of focus in imagery, scene recognition, and men tal animation. Based on these founda tions, we identify basic spatial or ganizing principles that are shared by the diverse subsystems col laborating in mental spatial reasoning. We discuss the implica tions of these principles in the frame work of a computational modeling ap proach and give an outline of the con ception of control of focus in our com putational architecture .

Cities on a map that are directly connected by a route are judged closer than unconnected cities. This route effect has been attributed to memory distortions induced by the integration of map information with high-level knowledge about implications of route connections. However, depicted routes also connect cities visually, thereby creating a single visual object—which implies a perceptual basis of the route effect. In this article we show that the effect does not depend on whether a map is presented as a map or as a meaningless pattern of symbols and lines (Experiment 1), and that the effect occurs even if spatial judgments are made vis-à-vis a permanently visible configuration (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that the distorted spatial representation is a by-product of perceptual organization, not of the integration of abstract knowledge in memory by given organization principles.

Diagrams are an effective means of conveying concrete, abstract or symbolic information about systems. Here, individuals or pairs of participants produced assembly instructions after assembling an object. When working individually, nearly all participants used a combination of text and diagrams. Those high in spatial ability produced the step-by-step action diagrams that in later studies were rated higher by all and improved performance of low ability participants. In a second experiment, pairs of participants assembled the object and produced instructions jointly. Pairs assembled the object faster and more accurately than individuals. Surprisingly, in the instructions produced, fewer than half the dyads used diagrams, and dyads produced fewer of the more effective diagrams. We speculate that the social verbal nature of the interactions of pairs encouraged verbal instructions.

We developed a method to analyze sketch maps by GIS, and applied it to an actual case study. We found that analysis using buffer operation was more effective for sketch map analyses than other methods, such as the entire road length method and area method. After modeling the buffer method, an experimental study of the micro-genetic cognitive process was conducted on sketch maps from Japanese students and Brazilian residents in Japan.

Results suggesting that changing perspective and switching across spatial environments held in memory are processes that take place in parallel were obtained from a task-switching experiment. Participants learned layouts of objects in two virtual rooms and then were asked to use their memories to locate the objects from various imagined viewing perspectives. Results revealed that, even after experiencing multiple perspectives, participants maintained viewpoint-dependent memories for the layouts, and that the latencies for changing perspective within and across environments followed a different pattern depending on whether participants imagined adopting the preferred view.

Diagrams often play an important role in human problem solving. A diagram can make a task more difficult, however, when it obscures important problem features, or requires repeated effort to interpret what it represents. Moreover, the nature and origin of diagrams can be as important as their exploitation during problem solving. This paper chronicles the complex interleaving of visual cognition with high-level reasoning in three subjects. Their diagrams and subsequent verbal protocols offer insight into human cognition. The diversity and richness of their response, and their ability to address the task via diagrams, provide an incisive look at the role diagrams play in the development of expertise. This paper recounts how their diagrams led, and misled, them; how their diagrams both explained and drove explanation; and how a spatial approach reported here can lead to deeper understanding of other simple games.

In this paper, a ternary qualitative calculus for spatial reasoning is presented that distinguishes between left and right. A theory is outlined for ternary point-based calculi in which all the relations are invariant when all points are mapped by rotations, scalings, or translations (RST relations). For this purpose, we develop methods to determine arbitrary transformations and compositions of RST relations. We pose two criteria which we call practical and natural. ‘Practical’ means that the relation system should be closed under transformations, compositions and intersections and have a finite base that is jointly exhaustive and pairwise disjoint. This implies that the well-known path consistency algorithm [10] can be used to conclude implicit knowledge. ‘Natural’ calculi are close to our natural way of thinking because the base relations and their complements are connected. The main result of the paper is the identification of a maximally refined calculus amongst the practical natural RST calculi, which turns out to be very similar to Ligozat’s flip-flop calculus. From that it follows, e.g., that there is no finite refinement of the TPCC calculus by Moratz et al that is closed under transformations, composition, and intersection.

We present first ideas on how results about qualitative spatial reasoning can be exploited in reasoning about action and change. Current work concentrates on a line segment based calculus, the dipole calculus and necessary extensions for representing navigational concepts like . We investigate how its conceptual neighborhood structure can be applied in the situation calculus for reasoning qualitatively about relative positions in dynamic environments.

Allen’s interval calculus is one of the most prominent formalisms in the domain of qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning. Applications of this calculus, however, are restricted to domains that deal with linear flows of time. But how the fundamental ideas of Allen’s calculus can be extended to other, weaker structures than linear orders has gained only little attention in the literature. In this paper we will investigate intervals in branching flows of time, which are of special interest for temporal reasoning, since they allow for representing indeterministic aspects of systems, scenarios, planning tasks, etc. As well, branching time models, i.e., treelike non-linear structures, do have interesting applications in the field of spatial reasoning, for example, for modeling traffic networks. In a first step we discuss interval relations for branching time, thereby comprising various sources from the literature. Then, in a second step, we present some new complexity results concerning constraint satisfaction problems of interval relations in branching time.

This paper gives the SNAP and SPAN ontologies relating to recognizing variable vista spatial environments, namely, SNAPVis and SPANVis. It proposes that recognizing spatial environments is a judgment process of whether the perceived environment is compatible with the remembered one. Their compatibility is based on both their spatial changes and the commonsense knowledge of objects’ stabilities. The recognition result is determined by whether such changes are due to possible movements of related objects or not. This paper presents six SNAPVis ontologies: fiat boundary, near region, fiat parts (the three are fiat regions), classic topologic relations, qualitative orientations, and qualitative distances (the three are spatial relations) and one SPANVis ontology: the commonsense knowledge of stability of spatial objects. The paper briefly presents a cognitive map of vista spatial environments and the process of recognition.