Summary
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The project addresses the ways in which humans make inferences about spatial relationships during complex navigation tasks by investigating wayfinding behavior and linguistic data in indoor as well as outdoor environments. Adult humans navigating in buildings and street networks do not perceive their surroundings with a blank mind; rather, previous experience leads to systematic expectations both about the structure of certain types of environment, and the options for navigating in them. Such mental presuppositions supplement the information that wayfinders actually receive via perceiving the real world, and via maps, signs, and linguistic descriptions. As a consequence, inference processes (which may be partly subconscious as well as probabilistic) support the wayfinders’ task of navigating in partially unknown environments; the incomplete spatial information is extended by standard expectations together with spatial reasoning. Together, these processes add up to the development of a (partial) cognitive map, guiding the wayfinder’s subsequent navigation decisions. This procedure may be encouraged or discouraged by particular environmental features or types of information provided to the wayfinder.
Our aim in this project is to gain a better understanding of these spatial inference processes by investigating human behavior and linguistic representations given different types of tasks, environments, and verbal and visual route information. Naturalistic navigation experiments address inferences made between floors in multi-level buildings with respect to local route choices and detour planning, pragmatic solutions found across different tasks, inference and reasoning processes in inconsistent (virtual) environments or those distorted by disaster, and the impact of varying types of input in the form of language-based route descriptions and maps. The behavioral results of these navigation experiments are analyzed in tandem with language data collected via think-aloud protocols and retrospective reports. In addition to a basic content analysis we also investigate the structural features of the language data, which are expected to be systematically related to the underlying conceptual phenomena. The systematic combination of linguistic and behavioral analysis will lead to a better understanding of the cognitive processes involved in wayfinding tasks with incomplete knowledge. |