The effect of a reference object’s orientation on the apprehension of spatial terms

Abstract

Keywords Spatial cognition x Spatial language x Orientation of a reference object Background The interaction between spatial cognition and language is important to both cognitive science and artificial intelligence. For example, if an interactive humanlike agent could understand spatial terms in natural language in a human manner, simulating human behavior and cognitive processes should be possible. Research in artificial intelligence and linguistics has provided theoretical and computational models of the apprehension of spatial language (Gorniak and Roy 2004; Herskovits 1986; Kreizer 1997; Yamanashi 2000). Cognitive psychology has empirically examined such theoretical and computational works and provided empirical data on the relationship between spatial cognition and language. Imai et al. (1999) examined the assignment of four Japanese spatial terms, mae, ushiro, hidari, and migi (similar to front, behind, left, and right, respectively, in English), in three-dimensional (3-D) computer graphics (CG) space. They found that the four spatial terms did not categorize the given space equally, and that the categorical patterns of space by these spatial terms were influenced by the orientation of the reference; object. When a reference object had no inherent front, mae/ushiro and hidari/migi had symmetrical boundaries in a pair, and the spatial areas of mae/ushiro were larger than those of hidari/migi. When a reference object had an inherent front, the areas of the four terms varied according to the orientation of the reference object. When a reference object was facing toward or away from participants, hidari/migi boundaries were symmetrical