Understanding Space: the nascent synthesis of cognition and the syntax of spatial morphologies

24-28 September, 200

The ingredients of an exosomatic cognitive map: isovists, agents and axial lines?

There is some evidence that an axial map, as used in space syntax, may be related to an underlying cognitive map in humans. However, the axial map is derived strictly from the mathematical configuration of space rather than any property of people. Hence there is a question of how a person might have embedded such a map. In this paper we report the results of several experiments which aim to improve the correlation between agent and pedestrian movement.We use a database of external occlusion points derived from isovists constructed throughout the system to provide a lookup table for agents to guide their movement. Since the table is external to the agents, we refer to the visual architecture as exosomatic. The results do improve on previous studies, but are still far from a good simulation of pedestrian movement. However, there is a philosophically important outcome from the experiments. When the agents are tuned to best performance, their movement patterns correspond to the axial structure of the system. This can be shown to be a mathematical result of their movement strategy; that is, the manifestation of movement, or the `memory' of an agent experiment, relates to the combination of the internal structure of the agent and its engagement with the environment in the form of an axial map. There are two unresolved steps from the relationship between individual and environment to human cognition: one, it cannot be shown that people do actually use occlusion points for movement, and two, even if they were to, it cannot be shown that they would use the resultant axial structure for higher level navigation decisions. Nevertheless, our results do provide evidence for a link between the individual and the axial map through embodiment of an agent-environment system, and our theory provides a mechanism for a link between the embodied map and preconditions for cognitive structure, which may in turn provide a basis for the future research into the means by which space syntax may be related to spatial cognition

Examining trade-offs between social, psychological, and energy potential of urban form

Urban planners are often challenged with the task of developing design solutions which must meet multiple, and often contradictory, criteria. In this paper, we investigated the trade-offs between social, psychological, and energy potential of the fundamental elements of urban form: the street network and the building massing. Since formal methods to evaluate urban form from the psychological and social point of view are not readily available, we developed a methodological framework to quantify these criteria as the first contribution in this paper. To evaluate the psychological potential, we conducted a three-tiered empirical study starting from real world environments and then abstracting them to virtual environments. In each context, the implicit (physiological) response and explicit (subjective) response of pedestrians were measured. To quantify the social potential, we developed a street network centrality-based measure of social accessibility. For the energy potential, we created an energy model to analyze the impact of pure geometric form on the energy demand of the building stock. The second contribution of this work is a method to identify distinct clusters of urban form and, for each, explore the trade-offs between the select design criteria. We applied this method to two case studies identifying nine types of urban form and their respective potential trade-offs, which are directly applicable for the assessment of strategic decisions regarding urban form during the early planning stages

From Isovists via Mental Representations to Behaviour: First Steps Toward Closing the Causal Chain

This study addresses the interrelations between human wayfinding performance, the mental representation of routes, and the geometrical layout of path intersections. The virtual reality based empirical experiment consisted of a route learning and reproduction task and two choice reaction tasks measuring the acquired knowledge of route decision points. In order to relate the recorded behavioural data to the geometry of the environment, a specific adaptation of isovist-based spatial analysis was developed that accounts for directional bias in human spatial perception and representation. Taken together, the applied analyses provided conclusive evidence for correspondences between geometrical properties of environments as captured by isovists and their mental representation

The cognitive roots of space syntax

During the last twenty-five years of research and real-world studies accomplished all over the globe, space syntax has consistently shown that movement patterns in cities and buildings tend to be strongly related to configurational properties of their respective spatial layouts. It has also been shown that individuals’ trajectories in virtual worlds are affected by the syntactic properties of these environments, and that the resulting emergent patterns may explain the detected correlations between configurational properties of space and movement patterns in real-world scenarios. However, none of these studies have so far attempted to elicit why these regularities occur at a more fundamental, cognitive level. In other words, they have not yet answered how the idea of spatial configuration shapes a person’s qualitative assessments and subsequent usage of spatial networks. This is the topic of this thesis. What kind of information do people extract from spatial configurations? How is this information used when assessing a spatial network qualitatively? How is this information used when one has to use such a network? These are some of the questions that this thesis will attempt to answer. This thesis will focus on map usage. By analysing how people interact with maps, this thesis will attempt to shed light on the processes by which people internalise configurational information and are able to define qualitative judgements that may be use in real-world scenarios. As a result, this thesis aims to be a further step in the ongoing process of linking space syntax with cognitive theory and therefore to contribute in the search of the cognitive roots of space syntax

A spatial analysis of the JBA headquarters in Splinter Cell: Double Agent

Three measures drawn from space syntax are proposed as means of describing game spaces with a view to a morphological critical analysis. These measures are: core integration and segregation, isovist area, and visibility/accessibility discrepancy (VAD). The measures are applied to the JBA headquarters levels in the stealth game Splinter Cell: Double Agent in order to evaluate the space in terms of the navigational challenges and affordances with which it presents the player and in terms of the rhythms of tension and relief inherent in its layout. It is demonstrated how these challenges and rhythms are married to the specific game tasks and events that each level contains

Geostatistical Analysis for the Study of Relationships between the Emotional Responses of Urban Walkers to Urban Spaces

The described study aims to find correlations between urban spatial configurations and human emotions. To this end, the authors measured people’s emotions while they walk along a path in an urban area using an instrument that measures skin conductance and skin temperature. The corresponding locations of the test persons were measured recorded by using a GPS-tracker (n=13). The results are interpreted and categorized as measures for positive and negative emotional arousal. To evaluate the technical and methodological process. The test results offer initial evidence that certain spaces or spatial sequences do cause positive or negative emotional arousal while others are relatively neutral. To achieve the goal of the study, the outcome was used as a basis for the study of testing correlations between people’s emotional responses and urban spatial configurations represented by Isovist properties of the urban form. By using their model the authors can explain negative emotional arousal for certain places, but they couldn’t find a model to predict emotional responses for individual spatial configurations