Christopher Habel

Spatial Cognition III

Within psychology, at least two research communities study spatial cognition. One community studies systematic errors in spatial memory and judgement, accounting for them as a consequence of and clue to normal perceptual and cognitive processing. The other community studies navigation in real space, isolating the contributions of various sensory cues and sensorimotor systems to successful navigation. The former group emphasizes error, the latter, selective mechanisms, environmental or evolutionary, that produce fine-tuned correct responses. How can these approaches be reconciled and integrated? First, by showing why errors are impervious to selective pressures. The schematization that leads to errors is a natural consequence of normal perceptual and cognitive processes; it is inherent to the construction of mental spaces and to using them to make judgments in limited capacity working memory. Selection can act on particular instances of errors, yet it is not clear that selection can act on the general mechanisms that produce them. Next, in the wild, there are a variety of correctives. Finally, closer examination of navigation in the wild shows systematic errors, for example, over-shooting in dead reckoning across species. Here, too, environments may provide correctives, specifically, landmarks. General cognitive mechanisms generate general solutions. The errors inevitably produced may be reduced by local specific sensori-motor couplings as well as local environmental cues. Navigation, and other behaviors as well, are a consequence of both. 1 Two Research Communities in Psychology Yes, the title evokes the mind-body problem. However one regards the venerable monumental mind-body problem in philosophy, there is a contemporary minor mindbody problem in the psychological research on spatial cognition. While the major 1 I am grateful to Christian Freksa for helpful comments and encouragement and to two anonymous reviewers for critiques of an earlier version of this manuscript. Preparation of the manuscript was supported by Office of Naval Research, Grants Number NOOO14-PP-1O649 and N000140110717 to Stanford University.

From temporal expressions to temporal information: semantic tagging of news messages

We present a semantic tagging system for temporal expressions and discuss how the temporal information conveyed by these expressions can be extracted. The performance of the system was evaluated wrt. a small hand-annotated corpus of news messages.

Spatial Cognition II

This paper posits the usefulness of mental shifts of scale and perspective in thinking and communicating about spatial relations, and describes two experimental techniques for researching such cognitive activities. The first example involves mentally expanding a hand-sized piece of entangled string, a knot, so that following a portion of the string into a crossing resembles the act of walking along a path and over a bridge. The second example involves transforming experience and conceptions of the large-scale environment to small-scale representations through the act of mapmaking, and then translating the map to depictions of street-level views. When used in the context of clinical research methodologies, these techniques can help to elicit multimodal expressions of conceived topological relationships and geographical detail, with particular attention to individual differences.

Pictorial representations of routes: chunking route segments during comprehension

Route directions are usually conveyed either by graphical means, i.e. by illustrating the route in a map or drawing a sketch-maps or, linguistically by giving spoken or written route instructions, or by combining both kinds of external representations. In most cases route directions are given in advance, i.e. prior to the actual traveling. But they may also be communicated quasi-simultaneously to the movement along the route, for example, in the case of in-car navigation systems. We dub this latter kind accompanying route directions. Accompanying route direction may be communicated in a dialogue, i.e. with hearer feedback, or, in a monologue, i.e. without hearer feedback. In this article we focus on accompanying route directions without hearer feedback. We start with theoretical considerations from spatial cognition research about the interaction between internal and external representations interconnecting linguistic aspects of verbal route directions with findings from cognitive psychology on route knowledge. In particular we are interested in whether speakers merge elementary route segments into higher order chunks in accompanying route directions. This process, which we identify as spatial chunking, is subsequently investigated in a case study. We have speakers produce accompanying route directions without hearer feedback on the basis of a route that is presented in a spatially veridical map. We vary presentation mode of the route: In the static mode the route in presented as a discrete line, in the dynamic mode, it is presented as a moving dot. Similarities across presentation modes suggest overall organization principles for route directions, which are both independent of the type of route direction-in advance versus accompanying-and of presentation mode-static versus dynamic. We conclude that spatial chunking is a robust and efficient conceptual process that is partly independent of preplanning.

Remarks on plural anaphora

The interpretation of plural anaphora often requires the construction of complex reference objects (RefOs) out of RefOs which were formerly introduced not by plural terms but by a number of singular terms only. Often, several complex RefOs can be constructed, but only one of them is the preferred referent for the plural anaphor in question. As a means of explanation for preferred and non-preferred interpretations of plural anaphora, the concept of a Common Association Basis (CAB) for the potential atomic parts of a complex object is introduced in the following. CABs pose conceptual constraints on the formation of complex RefOs in general. We argue that in cases where a suitable CAB for the atomic RefOs introduced in the text exists, the corresponding complex RefO is constructed as early as in the course of processing the antecedent sentence and put into the focus domain of the discourse model. Thus, the search for a referent for a plural anaphor is constrained to a limited domain of RefOs according to the general principles of focus theory in NLP. Further principles of interpretation are suggested which guide the resolution of plural anaphora in cases where more than one suitable complex RefO is in focus.

Representing referents of plural expressions and resolving plural anaphors

In this paper, two views for mentally representing referents of plural expressions are contrasted, (a) the atomic-tokens view, according to which the denotation of a plural expression is represented by a number of distinct tokens, and (b) the assemblage-token view, according to which it is represented as a single whole. Linguistic data suggest that the atomic-tokens view is appropriate for partitive plural NPs (e.g., most of the orphans ; both of the cars) and functionally similar expressions (e.g., most orphans ; both), whereas the assemblage-token view is appropriate for unmarked plural expressions (e.g., the orphans, my cars, they). This conjecture was investigated in two experiments with German participants, contrasting the pronoun sie (they) and the partitive pronoun beide (both). In Experiment 1, off-line tasks were used to investigate whether the interpretation of a sentences predicate depends on the pronoun used in the grammatical subject position. In Experiment 2, participants read texts containing a pronoun in different contexts, and sentence reading times were measured to find out whether or not the pronoun triggered a grouping of the individuals referred to. The results support the hypotheses derived from linguistic analyses.

Abstract Structures in Spatial Cognition

The importance of studying spatial cognition in cognitive science is enforced by the fact that the applicability of spatial concepts and spatial expressions is not limited to the spatial domain. We claim that common structures underlying both concrete, physical space and other domains are the basis for using spatial expressions, e.g., prepositions like between, with respect to space as well as time or other domains. This claim opposes the thesis that the common use is based upon an analogy between concrete space and other domains. The development of geometry from Euclids Elements to more differentiated systems of diverse geometries and topologies can be perceived of as an example of the transfer from modeling concrete space towards describing abstract spatial structures.

Lexical Specifications of Paths

Natural language descriptions of motion frequently combine verbs of motion and directional prepositions. This article presents an analysis of German expressions from these two classes and their interaction. The focus is on the spatial structures (called path) that link them. Paths and the relations accessing them are formally specified in a geometric framework and with reference to the situation structure. The analysis distinguishes verbs of motion from other kinds of verbs that combine with directional adverbs. In addition, it provides a basis for explaining certain restrictions in combining verbs of motion with directional prepositional phrases and for comparing different approaches to the same kind of expressions.

Processes of segmentation and linearization in describing events

Natural language production is widely considered from an information processing point of view: In producing an utterance, mental representations of perceived or conceived states of affairs are first transferred to an intermediate level of propositional representations and are subsequently transformed into grammatical structures. The latter serve as input structures for phonological encoding, which results in the acoustic realization of utterances. This description of the production process follows Levelt’s model, which is outlined in Levelt (1989). Within this model, which compiles a multitude of earlier research (e.g. Fromkin, 1971; Garrett, 1980; Butterworth, 1980; Shattuck-Hufnagel, 1986), three major components interact, that are each responsible for well-defined phases within the global process of speech production. The conceptualizer draws on different knowledge sources that provide representations in multimodal formats and generates propositional conceptual structures, so-called preverbal messages, which represent the content the speaker intends to verbalize. These non-linguistic preverbal messages are transferred to the formulator Within the formulator, language specific encoding takes place; the end results of this process serve as input for the articulator. The latter is the component that carries out the phonological processing and the acoustic realization of an utterance (cf. also the description of the language production model in Glatz, Klabunde & Porzel, this volume).

Propositional and Depictorial Representations of Spatial Knowledge: The Case of Path-Concepts

Knowledge representations are of central importance in natural language processing systems, and spatial representations have a central position in knowledge representation. The reasons for this are described, and then a brief example is given to justify the assumption of a a dual-coding approach for the processing of spatial expressions. This means that beyond propositional representations a second, non-propositional representation format is used, that of depictorial representations. These representations are studied in the present paper with respect to some of their topological properties.