Spatial updating in narratives.

Across two experiments we investigated spatial updating in environments encoded through narratives. In Experiment 1, in which participants were given visualization instructions to imagine the protagonist’s movement, they formed an initial representation during learning but did not update it during subsequent described movement. In Experiment 2, in which participants were instructed to physically move in space towards the directions of the described objects prior to testing, there was evidence for spatial updating. Overall, findings indicate that physical movement can cause participants to link a spatial representation of a remote environment to a sensorimotor framework and update the locations of remote objects while they move

Landmarks in OpenLS -- a data structure for cognitive ergonomic route directions

Landmarks support the structuring of environmental information into cognitive conceptual units, they have the potential to identify uniquely pertinent intersections for route following, and they disambiguate spatial situations at complex intersections. Not using them in automatically generated route directions is a violation of cognitive ergonomics. While we have made great progress on the one hand in characterizing and on the other hand in mining potential landmarks, viable data structures that incorporate their cognitive conceptual functions in route directions are poorly developed. The present article closes this gap by providing a representation based on the OpenLS standard that allows for capturing the semantics of landmarks. In this data structure, the cognitive conceptual essence of a landmark is represented allowing for generating route directions automatically and imbuing street network data with cognitively meaningful elements

Structural Salience of Landmarks for Route Directions

This paper complements landmark research with an approach to formalize the structural salience of objects along routes. The aim is to automatically integrate salient objects---landmarks---into route directions. To this end, two directions of research are combined: the formalization of salience of objects and the conceptualization of wayfinding actions. We approach structural salience with some taxonomic considerations of point-like objects with respect to their positions along a route and detail the effects of different positions on the conceptualization process. The results are used to extend a formal language of route knowledge, the wayfinding choreme theory. This research contributes to a cognitive foundation for next generation navigation support and to the aim of formalizing geosemantics