1,720,993 research outputs found
Facilitating Collective Cognition During Group Wayfinding Through the Human Eye
No full textWayfinding can be a challenging activity, requiring humans to select the appropriate route leading to the desired destination, keep track of the changes their position and orientation as they advance along the route, and recognize the destination upon their arrival. As such, wayfinding typically relies on the integration of novel spatial knowledge with an existing mental representation of the environment. Assistance systems can be utilized to help humans to complete the relevant tasks. Such systems can support during spatial knowledge acquisition and help humans coordinate and communicate their activities with others. An assistance system that is capable of recognizing the elements that humans see in their surroundings and uses this information to predict their interests and goals along a route can be a valuable tool for supporting wayfinding tasks, even during group wayfinding. Eye-tracking data can provide critical information regarding some of the cognitive processes involved during wayfinding. This information can be utilized to support the spatial cognition of a single person or the collective cognition of a larger group of people. This chapter demonstrates and discusses the way eye-tracking research can be utilized for acquiring, organizing, and utilizing spatial knowledge of a group of people during wayfinding, in order to investigate the relevant processes and further provide assistance
Recommended from our members
Defining the Community of Interest as a Criterion for Boundary Drawing of Electoral Districts
Get PDFWhen deciding where to draw the boundaries for electoral districts, officials often strive to ensure that communities of interest are not split up but kept together within a single district. What exactly constitutes a community of interest is somewhat vague, with legal and academic sources describing either a thematic region with shared demographic and land use traits or a cognitive region that is meaningful to people and commonly agreed upon. This research seeks to identify communities of interest at the sub-city level in both the thematic sense—by clustering Census tracts and land parcels according to classes of important variables—and the cognitive sense—by surveying residents about the location and extent of their community and finding areas of highest agreement. Then the degree to which the two senses of communities overlap is assessed; the more overlap, the more evidence there is that the two definitions correspond closely. Finally, the amount of overlap between the different communities and existing electoral districts is determined, to see which of the two types receives more attention from boundary drawers. The study finds that the two types of communities of interest correspond relatively well, and that the thematic type corresponds with the electoral districts better than the cognitive type
Recommended from our members
Paired social wayfinding: Dyadic interaction in real-world navigation
Get PDFThe cognitive process of wayfinding is necessarily situated in a social world, whether someone is traveling with another person to a shared destination or interpreting the physical traces of others’ activities to direct their travel. Wayfinding involves integrating multiple sources of information about the environment, one of which is the direct or indirect influence of the social context. The presented work expands our understanding of human navigation as it unfolds in a social context. I investigate pedestrian navigation by pairs of people (both stranger dyads and friend dyads) as well as individuals in an unfamiliar, real-world environment. In three studies, participants were asked to plan and enact a route between a given origin and destination. Each dyad or individual first devised a route using a map of the environment, then was taken to the environment and asked to navigate to the destination from memory alone. I video-recorded participants during both planning and navigation, using Conversation Analysis (CA) for the evaluation of social interaction. The complexity of human behavior in groups calls for such interdisciplinary methods of inquiry and approaches to understanding. With these studies I examine explanations for successful route planning, spatial and social strategies employed during wayfinding, and sources of uncertainty in navigation. This includes differences between situated and prospective planning—participants often collaboratively adapt their route-following on the fly based on unexpected challenges. This research contributes to the understanding of how people encode and coordinate their spatial knowledge to solve the important problem of navigating through the environment. It has further implications for the design of navigation aids, expanding what we know about the practices of multiple people working in conjunction on a wayfinding task
Architectural cognition and behavior
No full textArchitectural cognition is the set of perceptual and mental processes involved in the interaction between a building and its users. The following chapter reviews these phenomena, starting with the assumption that one of the key determinants of which processes are involved is the user’s physical relation to the building’s structure and the user’s movement (or lack thereof) through it. This results in a framework where cognitive processes involved in the dynamic exploration (various aspects of wayfinding) are reviewed separately from the ones possibly occurring from a single viewpoint (such as the appreciation of a facade). The chapter considers behavioral studies in the field of spatial cognition as well as architectural writings addressing the experience of (potential) building visitors. Research methods useful in the experimental design and formal analysis of architectural structures are emphasized; among them, space syntax and virtual reality have been particularly fruitful in recent studies of architectural cognition. Mobile eye-tracking and remote psychophysiological measures show interesting promise for the near future
Recommended from our members
The Nature and Scale of Cognitive Communities of Interest
Get PDFWhen drawing boundaries of electoral districts, officials often try to respect communities of interest (COIs) by keeping them intact. COIs can be defined socioeconomically, such as an area where a particular ethnic group concentrates, or cognitively, such as a neighborhood or region that people commonly agree upon. My research focuses on the nature and scale of the latter type, called cognitive COIs. I investigate whether people conceive of different scales of cognitive COIs when they are exposed to different map extents of their local area. If they are indeed different, that would point to the existence of different scales of cognitive COIs. I seek to answer this question through two studies. The first splits subjects into three groups and exposes each group to a different map extent; they then draw on the map where they think their COI is located. I find that the size of the COI that they draw depends greatly on map extent. The second study exposes subjects to two different map extents, but all of them receive the same two; they then rank places on the map according to how confident they are that they are in their COI. I likewise find that the size of the COI that they define by their rankings depends on the map extent. These findings indicate that the map induces people to externalize their COI at different scales, confirming that multiple scales of cognitive COIs exist and officials must be aware of that fact when they are redistricting at different levels of government
Recommended from our members
The Relevance of Granularity in Geospatial Open Data Search
Get PDFGranularity—the spatial, temporal, and thematic resolution at which information is represented—is an important contextual component of people’s conceptual models of the world. Yet, research on geographic information retrieval (GIR) systems—tools that search and serve geospatial data and information—has tended to assume granularity rather than empirically examine its utility in delivering relevant search results. Consequently, contemporary GIR systems rarely explicitly exploit granularity criteria, limiting their ability to deliver search results at the appropriate granularity. Driven by the theory that granularity is a core quality concept of spatial information, this dissertation presents three studies on how people search, what they search for, and how they judge granularity’s importance to relevance in GIR.Study one surveys user controls and algorithms of 35 popular geospatial data portals, which show rising search abandonment rates. These portals typically employ simplistic keyword-based algorithms for relevance and offer rudimentary controls for refining query granularity. Study two analyzes millions of search logs from the same portals. Most queries and refinements are short, cover various topics, and often contain explicit geospatial and temporal granularity keywords. Specialization and generalization of geospatial, temporal, and thematic granularity are common in refinements. Study three is a controlled user experiment where 80 undergraduates rate the relevance of search results whose granularity is systematically varied. Results aligned with a specific query’s granularity received the highest ratings. Changes in geospatial and temporal granularity significantly reduce relevance. For broad queries, these changes have little effect but require further investigation. Together, these mixed-methods findings demonstrate the underutilization of granularity in GIR systems and provide empirical support for the theory that granularity is a core quality concept of spatial information. This dissertation concludes with a discussion of these implications, including practical changes to enhance search efficacy and future research directions and applications, including granularity’s role in conversational and multi-modal semantic search and geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) foundational models
Recommended from our members
Representations of an Urban Neighborhood: Residents’ Cognitive Boundaries of Koreatown, Los Angeles
Get PDFThe neighborhood has long been studied in such fields as geography, sociology, political science, and urban planning as a meaningful unit of analysis, with deep connections for residents and an ever-shifting form. This study expands on foundational research about geographic regions (particularly informal or vague cognitive regions), sense of place, and environmental and travel perception, and takes as its focal area the neighborhood of Koreatown in Los Angeles. By collecting information about residents’ individual attributes, their concepts of this neighborhood region, and their travel activity within the city, I elucidate how ideas about the neighborhood fit into theories about sense of place. My work additionally demonstrates the value of surveying residents about vague concepts of local regions, and ways in which to measure and express these ideas.I conducted in-person surveys to explore the connection between residents’ cognitive boundaries of Koreatown, through drawn boundaries and explanations, and their behavior within the city of LA, represented by activity space measures. In doing so, I find ways in which respondents’ cognitive boundaries of the Koreatown neighborhood align with and differ from otherwise established definitions of Koreatown, presenting two methods of evaluating individual boundaries of a region. One of these ways of comparing polygons, the radial intersect method, is originally extended to the summary of multiple polygons. Collected temporary travel behavior of respondents provides a way of depicting respondents’ activity spaces in the LA region for comparison with their cognitive regions. Survey data is supplemented with socio-demographic data from the Census and field observations to contextualize these findings by looking at residential clustering and ethnic composition in the neighborhood and the greater Los Angeles region. My research makes an important contribution to our understanding of the urban neighborhood through an extensive analysis of a unique ethnic enclave from the perspective of local residents in one of the nation’s largest metropolises
Recommended from our members
Combining Qualitative and Quantitative tools for Enhancing Social Vulnerability Assessments: Peruvian Farmers’ Case Study
Get PDFThe intensity, frequency, duration, and spatial extent of weather and climate extremes are projected to experience changes. However, the impacts of such hazards are not straightforward. This issue is challenging mainly because natural hazards by themselves do not wholly explain the experienced impacts. Furthermore, the latest assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change moves away from the idea of vulnerability in terms of a hazard’s outcome and takes an approach in which vulnerability consists of pre-existing conditions that are exacerbated by climate variability and/or change. This framework is closer to that of the disaster risk reduction community and introduces approaches where the focus is on understanding those social vulnerabilities.This dissertation aims to enhance assessment tools that support the identification of those most vulnerable to climate hazards. Peruvian farmers from Puno are used as a case study, examined with both quantitative and qualitative approaches. This dissertation presents three studies that aim to enhance social vulnerability assessments. The first study uses qualitative data: ethnographic observations, semi-structured interviews, and local agencies reports. The other two studies used 22 quantitative indicators extracted from a dataset of over 200,000 farmers. The first of these two creates a composite index to explore social vulnerability at the farm, census unit, and municipality levels. The second quantitative study uses geons to create homogenous areas of vulnerability that do not necessarily correspond to administrative boundaries.Results point to a need to improve social capital among farmers as well as our need to increase our understanding of local social networks among farmers. The research revealed concerns people have with indoor thermal comfort as well as challenges in predicting and reporting droughts in the region. Social vulnerability maps and reported impacts were spatially associated, especially when weather hazards were not extreme. As expected, spatial patterns fluctuated by aggregation levels. The census unit level revealed patterns following specific topographic features in Puno. Furthermore, this dissertation showed how qualitative and quantitative methods can build on each other to create a more comprehensive assessment. Results from the dissertation have the potential to serve as scaffolding for future adaptation strategies in Puno and, eventually, in other areas where agriculture provides people’s main livelihood
Early geographic education:Cognitive considerations
No full textAdults know a great deal about geography, even if they have trouble locating particular countries on a map or cannot remember many state capitals. We know, for example, that there is a world beyond our direct experience and that maps are the primary means of representing geographical information. I refer to this informal understanding as implicit geography knowledge, and the focus of this chapter is on how this knowledge develops. The chapter reviews research on the development of children’s conceptions of space and place at different scales. The review suggests that even very young children can mentally represent small-scale spaces accurately, but that their knowledge of larger, geographic-scale spaces is more limited. Development consists in part of acquiring a mental model of the geographic-scale space. I consider research from cognitive development that may shed light on the developmental mechanisms that help children to extend what they understand about small-scale and large-scale space. The review suggests that geography education can begin at an early age, but that it should emphasize informal, playful activities that help children link maps and the spaces that they represent
- …
