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Whether humans form cognitive maps is controversial. One view is that the ability to generate detours and shortcuts demonstrates retention of direction and distance information integrated within a common frame of reference. Another view is that spatial representations are not Euclidean, given findings of biases, distortions, and lack of recognition of impossible spaces in VR. A compromise comes from an individual-differences perspective, suggesting that some people in some environments may integrate across routes. We created Virtual Copetown to examine within-route knowledge, integration between routes with experienced connections, and integration between routes requiring inference. We also examined cognitive correlates of the ability to make these judgments. Our results indicated that some people were more accurate across all kinds of pointing judgments including inferred relations, along with ability to construct an overall map of Copetown. A second group of people were less accurate overall, and less accurate for between-route relations than within-route relations; they also had worse mapping scores. Variability was related to self-reports of navigation strategy use. / Psychology

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In this dissertation, a new method of interaction with virtual reality (VR) has been presented. The VR environment, developed in this work provides a realistic and immersive environment that is developed for studying human’s spatial cognition abilities. Different technical aspects of the implementation are described. To improve the accuracy of the experiments, a new method for comparing and analyzing trajectories has been presented. A set of human subject experiments have been conducted using the developed platform. The first experiment was based on an ordinary computer, a joystick and 40 cognitively healthy participants within the age range of 19 to 82 years. Participants were asked to perform the VR spatial cognition test by navigating in the VR environment. It was found that computer usage skills had an effect on the overall performance of the participants as well as motion sickness; such an effect was undesirable. To resolve both problems, a novel input device made from the combination of a wheelchair and a motion capture unit, called VRNChair was developed. The VRNChair allows the participant to move physically in the real world in order to navigate in the VR environment. This allows participants to have a more intuitive interaction with the VR environment. Since the participant physically experiences the motion seen in the VR, motion sickness is minimized. A test based on two age groups, 34 young (< 40 years) and 20 older (60+ years) participants was performed. The results showed no difference between using the VRNChair or the joystick for the young participants while it showed considerable improvement among the older participants. Furthermore, it was noted that participants became distracted while using the VRNChair, Hence, a head mounted display (HMD) was added to the platform. A test with 14 males showed less distraction to the participant by using the HMD. Overall, the VR environment designed in this work passed all the validation experiments successfully. It offers a novel solution to overcome induced motion sickness experienced as a side effect of VR environments. / October 2016

In the field of robotics, there has recently been tremendous progress in the development of autonomous robots that offer various services to their users. Most of the systems developed so far, however, are restricted to indoor scenarios, non-urban outdoor environments, or road usage with cars. There is a serious lack of capabilities of mobile robots to navigate safely in highly populated outdoor environments. This ability, however, is a key competence for a series of robotic applications. We consider the task of developing a spatially motivated dialogue system that can operate on a robotic platform, where the purpose of such a robot is to aid pedestrians in urban environments to provide information about surrounding objects and services, and guide users to desired destinations. In this thesis, we make a number of contributions to the fields of spatial language interpretation/generation and discourse modelling. This includes the development of a dialogue framework called HURDLE which builds on the strengths of existing systems, accompanied by a specific implementation for spatially oriented dialogue including disambiguating amongst objects and locations in the environment, and a natural language parser which combines an extension of Synchronous Context Free Grammars with a Part-of-Speech tagger. Our research also presents a number of probabilistic models for spatial prepositions such as `in front of' and `between' that make significant advances in effectively utilising geometric environment data, encompassing visibility considerations and being reusable for both indoor and outdoor environments. We also present a number of algorithms in which these models can be utilised, most significantly a novel and highly effective algorithm that can generate natural language descriptions of objects that disambiguates on their location. All these components, while modular, operate in tandem and interact with a variety of external components (such as path planning) on the robot platform.

acase@tulane.edu / 1 / Emily A. Lewis

Digital maps of geographic areas are increasingly common in many types of workplace, in education and in the public domain. Their interactivity and visual features, and the complexity of geographic(al) information systems (GIS) which create, edit and manipulate them, create special cognitive demands on the end-user which are not present in traditional cartographic maps or in most human-computer interaction (HCI). This thesis reviews cross-disciplinary literature regarding cognitive aspects of viewing and interacting with digital maps. Data from an observational study of GIS use, including real-time recordings of normal workplace activities, was analysed using various approaches to examine the interactive and visual aspects of people's work. The implications for cartographic, psychological and HeI aspects of GIS are discussed, in the context of the actual tasks people perform with them (rather than the computationally advanced analyses assumed by most literature). The second phase of the research examined the spatial knowledge attained and used during this interaction. The relevance of specific concepts in cognitive psychology, and of factors that create individual differences in cognition, are discussed in depth, alongside work in environmental and educational psychology, cartography and geography. A controlled experiment examined the degree to which task characteristics induce a different spatial model or reference frame when viewing a digital map. It was shown that even novice users can switch between considering the map as an abstract geometric display or as a geographical representation, without affecting performance. However, tasks forcing subjects to focus entirely on the geometry rather than the geography did affect performance in a surprise post-test photograph identification task. Map users' mental model or reference frame is apparently affected by these task constraints; this has implications for GIS design and practice as well as for understanding spatial cognition The study also considered the role of expertise and other individual difference factors, although conclusions were limited by sample size. Further research issues are highlighted, particularly regarding the knowledge structures and spatial language used in interpreting digital maps.

The claim that neuronal activity represents properties of the world outside of the brain plays a fundamental role in most of cognitive science. Enacted embodiment is the name of a theoretical framework which purports cognition to be rooted in bodily action. To investigate the relationship between representation and embodiment, the work presented here focuses on reasoning processes involving spatial relations among objects which are not part of the cognizing agent’s body. These environmental spatial relations are called allocentric. After defining the term “representation,” a model of human cognition is developed which allows us to experimentally distinguish representation from computation and action in the brain. It is further argued that the relation of neural activity in areas classically considered sensory and motor is a fundamental organizational principle of the brain. Importantly, the structure of the relation also depends on the embodiment of the agent. Finally, a study is presented in which participants explored a virtual reality (VR) city in different embodiment conditions and on multiple days. After each exploration participants completed tasks asking for different allocentric spatial relations. Performance in the spatial tasks interacts with both exploration time and embodiment condition. The findings indicate allocentric spatial representations to be structured by bodily action. Remaining variance can be explained through individual differences in spatial aptitude. Embodiment cannot account for the individual levels of ability. In conclusion, bodily action only partially structures the cognitive processes which represent spatial relations among objects in the agent’s environment.