This study has investigated navigation strategies and spatial memory in Euclidean versus non-Euclidean environments. It also had a focus on mental maps, homing abilities and past video game experiences. Two test groups traversed mazes with identical layouts, but in which the non-Euclidean version incorporated wormholes that teleported participants in an, to the participant, unobvious manner. Data such as distances, time taken, and individual routes was collected. A thematic survey regarding strategies and tests for deeming what kind of mental map the participants used were also employed. Shapiro-Wilk tests, QQ-plots, PCA, Boxplots, T-tests, Heatmaps and Mann-Whitney U tests were used depending on the suitable data. Results showed that there were no significant differences between the two test groups in terms of quantifiable data and overall strategies used, while still there were signs of better performance for both groups in some certain respects. At the look on the groups as a whole, the participants that were deemed to use cognitive topological graphs, rather than cognitive Euclidean maps, were more successful in achieving the objectives. The results imply that areas like game design can be pushed further when it comes to using abstract or non-conventional spaces created by wormholes, without having a negative effect on the players navigational abilities. The results are also consistent with prior research in the field of psychology that refers to people using both maps and graphs as a cognitive representation of space.

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Master of Science / Department of Architecture / David R. Seamon / This thesis provides an overview of some key researchers and research topics in the field of environment-behavior studies (EBS), an interdisciplinary field that examines ways in which the natural and human-made environments contribute to human well-being. A key aim of environment-behavior studies is to better understand clients’ and users’ environmental needs, and to design the physical environment accordingly. Specifically, this thesis highlights two key research questions: (1) What are environment-behavior studies and why are they relevant to architecture and environmental design? and (2) How can environment-behavior studies be drawn upon practically to generate more effective architectural and environmental design? To provide answers to these two questions, the thesis first introduces five “pioneers” in environment-behavior studies— psychologist Roger Barker, anthropologist Edward Hall, psychologist Robert Sommer, urban designer Kevin Lynch, and architect Christopher Alexander—and reviews their major work. This discussion provides a general understanding as to what environment-behavior studies involve and how they have design significance. Next the thesis overviews three major theories developed in environment-behavior studies: (1) territoriality theory; (2) cognitive-mapping theory; and (3) prospect-refuge theory. Each of these theories is overviewed, and pragmatic examples are provided to indicate each theory’s value for architecture and environmental design.

The representation of Chancery court in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1852-3) emphasises the inaccessibility of this institution to members of the laity. Dickens’ critique of Chancery chimes with Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological description of law as a formalistic social field defined by practices of exclusion. Dickens’ Chancery is however further inaccessible since it departs from Dickens’ laypeople’s horizons of expectation as a bureaucratic organisation characterised by its structural dispersion and the generation of great quantities of writing. This thesis therefore scrutinises Dickens’ treatment of Chancery in light of media-theoretical and geocritical, as well as sociological, frameworks and perspectives. This essay demonstrates that Dickens’ account of the institution of Chancery as conceptually inaccessible amounts to what I term a non-world heuristic. I contend that Dickens’ take on law anticipates what Fredric Jameson famously theorises as the dizzying “global world system” of late capitalism; the non-world heuristic of Bleak House—which combats disorientation in the social domain of law—may thus be understood as an early example of what Jameson terms an “aesthetic of cognitive mapping.” The non-world heuristic, this thesis proposes, likely has a role to play also in fictional attempts to cognitively map the global world system. I theorise the non-world heuristic in light of the discourse on accessibility in possible-worlds theory and the Kantian sublime, finding that the sublime non-world of Chancery is made accessible as inaccessible and that this dynamic is integral to Dickens’ aesthetic both as a maker of cognitive maps and as a realist novelist.

This study will embrace certain features of postmodern experience so as to underline subjective embodiment as the condition, corollary, and appropriate focus of textual, rhetorical, and sociopolitical criticism. It will theorize somantics as a conceptual toolkit for mapping the structural correspondence of embodiment to the symbolic order, each thus emerging as the other’s non-foundational “efficient reason.” This study will argue that the flesh mediates the theoretic divisions of structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and existentialism, although not in a priori or essentialist ways. It will draw from their vocabularies, combining them into a vocabulary of its own while retexturing their relation to one another. It thus aspires to reduce all rhetorics and metaphysics to the somantic, so as to sabotage conservative fundamentalisms and to establish the terms for an argument with enthusiasts of transhumanism. Moreover, this study will suggest that theoretic systems, cultural messages, and sociopolitical speech-acts inattentive to the condition of embodiment—whether that of their agents, interlocutors, or material mediums of expression— must then seem at once suspicious, maladaptive to the sense contingencies of the moment, and deserving of somantic reduction. In correcting these faults, it will also resist systematizing or universalizing sense-experience; it will function rather as a corpus of maps that rechart the volatile, moment-to-moment interimplication of the somatic and the symbolic. Thus this study takes axiomatically Frederic Jameson’s claim that intertextuality replaces history in the era of transnational capital, seeing in this argument the strategic advantage of taking a theoretic standpoint against diachronic modalities of time. Arguing for the reconstruction of certain narratives as distortions, if not outright falsifications, of the simultaneation of needs, impressions, and changes in a subject’s sense-experience, this study will redirect attention to the relation of certain discourses to the bodies of their interlocutors.

This thesis is meant to give an explication on Fredric Jameson¡¦s Utopian thinking through transcoding, establishing homologies between Lacan¡¦s Imaginary/Symbolic/Real registers, Althusser¡¦s ideology/History binary and Jameson¡¦s ideology/cognitive mapping/History orders. I think Jameson¡¦s Utopian thinking is a mechanism of praxis to induce change for a classless and human-friendly society through theoretical education on desire and formation of consciousness of the capitalistic alienation and exploitation. It is a process of signifying, with no signified. It aims at the construction of a map of the social totality, not at that of an imaginary blueprint. It stresses consciousness-raising, not goal achievement. Traditionally, Utopia features an imaginary blueprint. Nevertheless, for Jameson, the Utopian blueprint is problematic in that it is ideologically enclosed so that it is far from qualified to serve as the goal of praxis. At best, a Utopian blueprint can only be viewed as a ¡§figure¡¨ waiting for the interpretation of theory, or to put it psychoanalytically, it is a symptom of the (political) unconscious awaiting the diagnosis of a psychoanalyst. But Jameson does endorse Utopists¡¦ ¡§Utopian praxis¡¨ to map and criticize their respective social context. The critic applies the practice to the postmodern, in which time is spatialized and the individual is fragmented and deprived of the ability to think historically and to imagine an alternative future. Jameson proposes the approach of ¡§cognitive mapping¡¨ to help people to obtain a map of the postmodern hyperspace, to locate their positions in it, and to finally reconstruct in them class consciousness, which Jameson believes is the basis of praxis for a Utopia. This task has to be done through the construction of the collective subject, because of the death of the subject and the growing abstraction of postmodern hyperspace. And certainly in this undertaking, Marxist critics like Jameson play an important role. They, like a psychoanalyst, are entitled to diagnose and interpret what the current world is suffering from and to offer prescriptions. In conclusion, Fredric Jameson¡¦s Utopian thinking is a persistent process of praxis at present to form collective consciousness and subjectivity in the hope of an unspecified Utopia in the future, which is supposed to be a communist one.

Cette thèse sur le management des systèmes comptables dans les fusions-acquisitions repose sur l’étude de vingt-deux opérations de fusions-acquisitions réalisées entre 1992 et 2007 par quatre groupes, cotés ou non, opérant dans des secteurs différents (distribution, vins et spiritueux, champagne, sidérurgie). L’analyse des données est effectuée en utilisant la cartographie cognitive pour les entretiens et la matrice chronologique pour les autres données recueillies (observation directe, études de documents in-situ et externes). Les résultats montrent des approches différenciées et non linéaires selon les groupes acquéreurs. En s’inspirant des modèles d’acculturation, une double typologie des déterminants et des conséquences de l’intégration des systèmes comptables dans chaque groupe étudié et un modèle général ont été élaborés en distinguant quatre logiques d’intégration : l’absorption, la séparation, l’adoption partielle inversée et la combinaison. A partir de ce modèle, nous recensons les caractéristiques de l’intégration des systèmes comptables dans les quatre groupes étudiés en isolant les facteurs explicatifs et les conséquences dans chaque logique d’intégration. Ensuite, nous construisons une typologie de l’intégration des systèmes comptables dans les fusions-acquisitions en mettant en évidence les facteurs explicatifs prédominants tels que le mode de gestion peu ou très centralisé du groupe acquéreur et le niveau plus ou moins avancé des systèmes comptables du groupe acquéreur et de l’entreprise acquise. Au niveau des conséquences, l’adaptation plus ou moins volontaire des salariés aux changements organisationnels proposés ou imposés par le groupe acquéreur se détache fortement hormis dans la logique séparation où ces changements apparaissent comme mineurs dans la mesure où les équipes en place et les méthodes de travail sont maintenues. / This thesis on the management of the accounting systems in the mergers-acquisitions rests on the survey of twenty-two operations of mergers-acquisitions achieved between 1992 and 2007 by four groups, quoted or no, operating in different sectors (distribution, wines and spirits, champagne, steel industry). The analysis of the data is done while using the cognitive mapping for the interviews and the chronological matrix for the other introverted data (direct observation, study of in-situ documents and external). The results show the differentiated approaches and non linear according to the groupspurchasers. While being inspired by the acculturation models, a double typology of the determinants and the consequences of the accounting systems integration in every studied group and a general model has been elaborated while distinguishing four logical of integration: the absorption, the separation, the reversed partial adoption and the combination. From this model we count features of the accounting systems integration in the four studied groups while isolating the explanatory factors and the consequences in every logic of integration. Then, we construct a typology of the accounting systems integration in the mergers-acquisitions while putting little in evidence the predominant explanatory factors as the fashion of management or very centralized more or less of the group purchaser and the level advanced of the accounting systems of the grouppurchaser and the enterprise acquired. To the level of the consequences, the adaptation more or less voluntary of the salaried employee to the proposed organizational changes either imposed by the group purchaser detaches himself strongly except in the logical separation where these changes appear like miners insofar as the teams in place and themethods of work are maintained.

In this dissertation the complex, dynamic, contextual and multi-dimensional practice of teachers’ use of digital technologies in their everyday work has been illustrated and presented. The research draws upon the experience of teachers and school leaders from two compulsory schools as well as representatives from the municipal Department of Education and IT-unit within a municipality in the south of Sweden. A focused ethnographic approach has been undertaken and applied observations and interviews. Systems Thinking, specifically Soft Systems Methodology in combination with Cognitive Mapping have been applied to analyze the empirical material. The theoretical foundation builds upon teachers’ worldview towards digital technologies, because it is noted that teachers more easily adopt and use innovations that are in accordance with their personal thoughts and beliefs about teaching and learning. Further, teachers’ attitude and perception towards use of digital technologies are addressed as well as the role of school leadership. Additionally, importance of context, teachers’ knowledge and pedagogics have been discussed referring to various frameworks. The dissertation aims to illuminate the complex nature of teachers’ everyday practice. To gain understanding of the situation as a whole, there is also need to shed light on various aspects and underlying perspectives. Thus, this research aims to illuminate and advance the understanding of the complexity of compulsory school teachers’ everyday work practices using digital technologies. The outcome of this dissertation illustrates the complexity of teachers’ everyday practices as well as additional issues adding to the complexity, and shows that these complex issues are worthy of further study. Among the issues emerged from this dissertation are differences in regard to how the complex situation is understood because different actors have multiple and sometimes conflicting worldviews. Ambiguities in core objectives and relevant concepts were found. Additionally, a pervasive lack of understanding about the realities of daily education and teaching practices, including variances in worldviews and mindsets was found adding to the complexity of teachers’ everyday practice using digital technologies.

Studium prostorové syntaxe a prostorového poznání (vnímání) ukázalo a určilo statistický vztah mezi vlastnostmi prostoru a prostorovým poznáváním (schopnost jednotlivců připomenout a představit si mapu prostoru). Disertační práce zdůrazňuje aspekt prostorového poznávání, který je založen na podobě a kvalitě prostředí. Prezentuje myšlenku, že poznávací mapování jako proces je kulturně vymezený. Jeho výsledky jsou přejímány a filtrovány z prostředí, v němž lidé žijí. To znamená, že mohou vznikat různé výsledky poznávacího mapování a různé výsledky založené na lidských hodnotách. Pokud by se prokázalo, že proces je ovlivněn hodnotami lidí a jejich kulturními návyky, znamenalo by to, že existuje další faktor individuální mentální reprezentace prostoru. Ten zahrnuje aspekty, které pomáhají jednotlivcům získat specifické povědomí o tom, co je pro ně vyhovující prostředí. Cílem disertační práce je analyzovat tento předpoklad zkoumáním vztahu mezi vlastnostmi prostoru a prostorovým poznáváním a prokázat, že rozdíl v kultuře lidí ovlivňuje tento vztah. V práci jsou zodpovězeny dvě klíčové otázky: První - zda existuje souvislost mezi prostorovým vnímáním a satisfakcí lidí z jejich životního prostředí, a druhá - zda taková spokojenost ovlivňuje vztah mezi prostorovým uspořádáním a prostorovým poznáním. Další otázka plynoucí z analýzy zní: Které kulturní hodnoty jsou spojeny s procesem prostorového poznání? Mezi hlavní nástroje a postupy používané v práci patří: software prostorové syntaxe, analýza vlastností prostoru v rámci dvou studijních oblastí - Brno centrum města (Česká Republika) a staré Město Damašek (Sýrie), dotazník zkoumající spokojenost lidí, test prostorového mapování a pozorování chodců. Z analýzy vyplývá: Za prvé - existuje vztah mezi prostorovým poznáním a satisfakcí, za druhé - prostorové poznání má tendenci být ovlivněno nejen strukturou prostoru, ale také způsobem, jakým ho lidé vnímají a jaký mu přisuzují smysl. Práce se snaží celkově objasnit vliv prostorové konfigurace na vztah mezi lidmi a prostorem, zvlášť na vztah mezi prostorovou konfigurací a množstvím lidí v prostoru.

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