GIScience 2008 Workshop on

The Cognitive Approach
to Modeling Environments (CAME)

2nd International Workshop

Tuesday, September 23th, 2008

Workshop cancelled!

An environment's spatial characteristics influence human behavior in and conceptualization of that environment. This workshop addresses the adequate representation of this interaction between environment and human behavior in terms of computational models of space. It follows the successful CAME'06 workshop held at GIScience in Münster, Germany.

Motivation and Aim

There is a consensus that the characteristics of an environment influence human performance in spatial tasks. For an (extreme) example, compare localization in a maze relative to its exit with localization in open space with respect to a nearby landmark.

From a cognitive perspective, Montello (1993) provides a general classification of environments according to their relation to the size of the human body and the consequences on human perception and conception of these spaces. Furthermore, there has been research identifying spatial factors that influence human performance and ability in spatial (navigation) tasks (e.g., Weisman, 1981; Gärling, 1986). In architecture, Lynch (1960) classified elements in the environment that shape people's 'image of a city'. In urban planning, space syntax (Hillier & Hanson, 1984) provides a set of representations that reflect and predict social behavior in urban areas. While this is clearly sociologically motivated, space syntax researchers started to take cognitive considerations into account (e.g., Zimring & Conroy Dalton, 2003; Hölscher, Conroy Dalton & Turner, 2007). Finally, the modality of locomotion (on foot, by car, etc.) poses additional constraints for cognitively meaningful models of space.

In contrast, today's location-based services or mobile systems just distinguish indoor and outdoor space without any further consideration of other spatial factors. Many other environmental characteristics, such as an environment's general structure or configurations of features that may single out places, are not taken into account in computational models for spatial assistance. Consequently, there is a gap between the widely deployed models of space and what research in cognitive science and related fields identified as being important for human interaction with and conceptualization of space. Bridging this gap must be a concern for GIScience.

References
Gärling, T., Lindberg, E., & Mäntylä, T. (1983), Orientation in buildings: Effects of familiarity, visual access, and orientation aids. Journal of Applied Psychology 68(1):177-186.
Hillier, B. & Hanson, J. (1984), The Social Logic of Space. Cambridge University Press.
Hölscher, C., Conroy Dalton, R. and Turner, A. (2007), Space Syntax and Spatial Cognition. Proceedings of the workshop held in Bremen, SFB/TR8 Monographs vol. 2. Bremen: Universität Bremen.
Lynch, K. (1960), The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Montello, D. R. (1993), Scale and multiple psychologies of space. In A.U. Frank & I. Campari (eds.), Spatial Information Theory: A Theoretical Basis for GIS (pp. 312-321). Berlin: Springer.
Weisman, J. (1981), Evaluating architectural legibility: Way-finding in the built environment. Environment and Behavior 13(2):189-204.
Zimrig, C. & Conroy Dalton, R. (2003), Linking objective measures of space to cognition and action. Environment and Behavior 35(1):3-16.

Topics and Questions

Primitives of the models:

• What are the basic representational mechanisms and building blocks in cognitively motivated models of space?
• How do we model specific types of environments (indoor vs. outdoor; vista (visible) vs. environmental (large-scale) vs. geographical space)?
• Can we identify common elements and structures in these models and transformations? How can we identify salient environmental characteristics that may influence human behavior (structural and functional complexity, landmarks, symmetries)?

Elements of space, principles of representations, and spatial ontologies:

• What are the environmental characteristics we need to address and how can we classify them (taxonomies, ontologies)?
• How can we bridge the gap between "traditional" GIS models (vector / raster / network) and findings in cognitive psychology?
• Should we build on the traditional GIS models or do we need to build new models from scratch?

Applications: Communication of spatial information:

• How can we adapt the presentation of spatial information to the environmental situation?
• How can we identify and emphasize the information relevant for this situation?
• How can real-world applications, such as location based services, benefit from such models?
• What are specifics and what are commonalities of different representational formats?

Applications: Designing environments:

• How do we exploit these models when designing a new building or neighborhood?
• Which are good, feasible ways to improve "difficult" environments (signage, structural changes, etc)?
• How do we avoid designing "difficult" environments in the first place?

Organization

This workshop is one in a series of workshops that complement the GIScience 2008 conference in Park City, Utah, USA (September 23-26). It comprises presentations of the accepted papers, followed by discussions in small groups with report-back to the plenum.

Last updated: 2008-02-11