Representing Space in Cognition Interrelations of behaviour, language, and formal models

This book considers how people talk about their environment, find their way in new surroundings, and plan routes. Part I explores the empirical insights gained from research in the cognitive underpinnings of spatial representation in language. Part II proposes solutions for capturing such insights formally, and in Part III authors discuss how theory is put into practice through spatial assistance systems. These three perspectives stem from research disciplines which deal with the spatial domain in different ways, and which often remain separate. In this book they are combined so as to highlight both the state of the art in the field and the benefit of building bridges between methodologies and disciplines. Finding our way and planning routes is relevant to us all; this book ultimately helps improve our everyday lives.

1 - Introduction
2 - Describing the Way Out of a Cornfield: Understanding congitive underpinnings of comprehending survey and route descriptions
3 - Spatial Representations for Described and Perceived Locations
4 - The Processing of Landmarks in Route Directions
5 - Selection of Reference Objectives for Locative Expressions: The importance of knowledge and perception
6 - Spatial prototypes
7 - Learning to Interpret Spatial Natural Language in Terms of Qualitative Spatial Relations
8 - Cognitive Operations in Tour Planning
9 - Navigation Assistance for Blind Pedestrians: Guidelines for the design of devices and implications for spatial cognition
10 - A Computational Model of Cooperative Spatial Behaviour for Virtual Humans
11 - The 'Space' in Spatial Assistance Systems: Conception, formalisation, and computation

Thora Tenbrink is a Lecturer in Cognitive Linguistics at Bangor University (Wales, UK). She worked for ten years as a research scientist at the Faculty of Linguistics at Bremen University (Germany), and is a principal investigator in two projects in the Collaborative Research Center SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition (Bremen/Freiburg). Her main interest concerns the relationship between cognitive processes and linguistic representations. She is the author of Space, Time, and the Use of Language (Mouton de Gruyter, 2007), and editor, with Kenny Coventry and John Bateman, of Spatial Language and Dialogue (OUP, 2009). Jan Wiener is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Bournemouth (UK). Previously he has worked as a research scientist at the University of Freiburg (Germany), the CNRS (Paris, France), and the Max-Planck-Institute for Biological Cybernetics (Tübingen, Germany). His research focuses primarily on the cognitive processes and strategies that underly navigation and wayfinding behaviour. Christophe Claramunt is a Professor in Computer Science and Chair of the Naval Academy Research Institute in France. He was previously a Senior Lecturer in Computing at the Nottingham Trent University and a Senior Researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University de Bourgogne in France. His main research interests concern theoretical and multi-disciplinary aspects of geographical information science, including spatio-temporal and computational models, alternative models of space, semantic GIS, integration of GIS and simulation systems, and the spatial Web.