Global Landmarks Research Articles

Global Landmarks of Digital Citizenship in the Conditions of Today's Globalization Challenges

The article is devoted to the analysis of digital citizenship as an effective strategy for the development of worldview orientations of student youth in the modern digital age. The main methods of scientific research are structural, comparative, analysis, synthesis, generalization and the method of collecting sociological information. Digital citizenship is presented as a worldview based on safety, morality, legality, responsibility and intellectual honesty. The key parameters of digital citizenship are determined - digital literacy, digital etiquette, digital rights and responsibilities, digital health, digital security, digital communication, digital commerce, digital access, and their essential features are clarified. It is noted that safety and well-being in the digital age defines the ability to counter the risks that the digital world can bring in order to protect one's physical and mental well-being. Accordingly, digital citizenship should be understood as a way to prepare the younger generation for active participation in society and in serving the nation's interests in the digital environment. The main features of today's youth as the Internet generation are outlined - highly ambitious, realistic, critical, self-confident. Thanks to the ability to quickly search for information, representatives of the Internet generation are more knowledgeable and informed about the events and phenomena of the surrounding world. The representatives of the Internet generation choose social networks as the preferred resource for communication, which they use not only to search for information or communicate, but also for active self-presentation of their own social position. Taking into account the international experience of scientific research, digital citizenship not only provides opportunities for safer moral-ethical and socio-legal functioning in the digital environment in the face of global challenges of the modern digital age, but also forms the worldview foundations of the formation of a conscious and socially responsible personality with an active civic position capable of influencing social and political processes. Digital citizenship ensures the effective integration of young people into the digital social space, therefore there is a need to study the basic principles of digital citizenship in higher education institutions of Ukraine

Does viewing an environment without occluders improve spatial learning of a large-scale virtual environment?

This study tested the effect of providing a vista view of a large-scale environment on spatial learning. During normal navigation, we can only perceive limited regions at a time. To learn the spatial layout, we would have to integrate information from multiple views. If an unoccluded view of the full environment was displayed (vista view), would this improve spatial learning? We tested this experimentally using VR in two pre-registered experiments. We created vista views of urban environments by compressing the height of most non-target buildings, allowing participants to see the whole space and configuration of target buildings from an egocentric perspective. In Experiment 1 (N = 32), the vista view was presented during travel to each target on learning trials. In Experiment 2 (N = 36), the vista view was presented for 10s in a preview period before each learning trial. After the learning phase, they were tested on judgments of relative direction (JRD) to measure survey knowledge, and wayfinding to measure route knowledge. We hypothesized that the vista views would improve survey knowledge by allowing participants to directly observe the locations of targets relative to each other and global landmarks, but there might be little or no benefit for route knowledge. Surprisingly, even though the vista view allowed participants to see the configuration of targets at once, there was no improvement in JRD or wayfinding performance compared to the normal condition where visibility is limited to local regions. Our results suggest that a street-level unoccluded view may have limited benefit for learning a large-scale environment through navigation.

Heatmap-Guided Selective Feature Attention for Robust Cascaded Face Alignment

Face alignment methods have been actively studied using coordinate and heatmap regression tasks. Although these regression tasks have the same objective for facial landmark detection, each task requires different valid feature maps. Therefore, it is not easy to simultaneously train two kinds of tasks with a multi-task learning network structure. Some studies have proposed multi-task learning networks with two kinds of tasks, but they do not suggest an efficient network that can train them simultaneously because of the shared noisy feature maps. In this paper, we propose a heatmap-guided selective feature attention for robust cascaded face alignment based on multi-task learning, which improves the performance of face alignment by efficiently training coordinate regression and heatmap regression. The proposed network improves the performance of face alignment by selecting valid feature maps for heatmap and coordinate regression and using the background propagation connection for tasks. This study also uses a refinement strategy that detects global landmarks through a heatmap regression task and then localizes landmarks through cascaded coordinate regression tasks. To evaluate the proposed network, we tested it on the 300W, AFLW, COFW, and WFLW datasets and obtained results that outperformed other state-of-the-art networks.

Eye morphology and colour preferences in a semi-field test of the pine pest, Sirex noctilio (Hymenoptera: Siricidae)

The woodwasp, Sirex noctilio, is a global pest of pines. Although it is known to be attracted to light and possess sexually dimorphic body colouration, the visual ecology of S. noctilio is poorly understood. Photoreceptor sensitivity of the compound eyes in S. noctilio is not sexually dimorphic. These previous results suggest that colour tracking of one sex by the other might not be an important input for mate searching. This study aimed to expand our knowledge of the visual system of S. noctilio by means of i) morphological description of the compound eyes and ocelli; and ii) semi-field behavioural tests of the colour preference of newly emerged wasps. Eye and ocellus morphological features were investigated in 21 males and 21 females. Measurement of male and female median ocellus diameter, compound eye surface area, number of ommatidia and facet diameter varied from 0.22 to 0.40 mm, 0.589 to 2.277 mm2, 1820 to 4207 and 1.88 × 10–2 to 2.82 × 10–2 mm, respectively. In addition, all traits significantly correlated with body size. Male and female wasps emerged from infested host material in a flight cage with five traps, each reflecting a different colour. Analysis of trap captures did not identify any colour preference, but an effect of trap location was observed with traps in the north-eastern position capturing more woodwasps, suggesting that other factors, e.g., global landmarks or other non-colour visual cues might guide initial flight behaviour of S. noctilio.

Overall Visibility Might Offer False Affordance to Indoor Wayfinding: The Role of Global and Local Landmarks

Using a virtual 3D model of a shopping center, this study explored whether greater visibility provided by transparent walls in the building model, along with the presence of global and local landmarks, facilitated indoors wayfinding. Participants observed video clips of a virtual walkthrough either in a building with transparent or opaque walls, responded to wayfinding questions, and their eye movements were tracked while watching the video. Findings showed no significant difference between participants in the transparent and opaque building in answering wayfinding questions. Eye movements showed significantly longer eye fixations for participants in the transparent building compared to participants in the opaque building, in addition to longer fixations on global landmarks compared to local landmarks. Taken together, the findings imply that the greater visibility through the transparent walls may have offered false wayfinding affordance, rather than facilitate wayfinding decisions.

Using virtual global landmark to improve incidental spatial learning

To reduce the decline of spatial cognitive skills caused by the increasing use of automated GPS navigation, the virtual global landmark (VGL) system is proposed to help people naturally improve their sense of direction. Designed to accompany a heads-up navigation system, VGL system constantly displays silhouette of global landmarks in the navigator’s vision as a notable frame of reference. This study exams how VGL system impacts incidental spatial learning, i.e., subconscious spatial knowledge acquisition. We asked 55 participants to explore a virtual environment and then draw a map of what they had explored while capturing electroencephalogram (EEG) signals and eye activity. The results suggest that, with the VGL system, participants paid more attention during exploration and performed significantly better at the map drawing task—a result that indicates substantially improved incidental spatial learning. This finding might kickstart a redesigning navigation aids, to teach users to learn a route rather than simply showing them the way.

Empirical characterisation of agents’ spatial behaviour in pedestrian movement simulation

Route choice behaviour is a key factor in determining pedestrian movement flows throughout the urban space. Agent-based modelling, a simulation paradigm that allows modelling individual behaviour mechanisms to observe the emergence of macro-level patterns, has not employed empirical data regarding route choice behaviour in cities or accommodated heterogeneity. The aim of this paper is to present an empirically based Agent-Based Model (ABM) that accounts for behavioural heterogeneity in pedestrian route choice strategies, to simulate the movement of pedestrians in cities. We designed a questionnaire to observe to what degree people employ salient urban elements (local and global landmarks, regions, and barriers) and road costs (road distance, cumulative angular change) and to empirically characterise the agent behaviour in our ABM. We hypothesised that a heterogeneous ABM configuration based on the construction of agent typologies from empirical data would portray a more plausible picture of pedestrian movement flows than a homogeneous configuration, based on the same data, or a random configuration. The city of Münster (DE) was used as a case study. From a sample of 301 subjects, we obtained six clusters that differed in relation to the role of global elements (distant landmarks, barriers, and regions) and meaningful local elements along the route. The random configuration directed the agents towards natural elements and the streets of the historical centre. The empirically based configurations resulted in lower pedestrian volumes along roads designed for cars (25% decrease) but higher concentrations along the city Promenade and the lake (40% increase); based on our knowledge, we deem these results more plausible. Minor differences were identified between the heterogeneous and homogeneous configurations. These findings indicate that the inclusion of heterogeneity does not make a difference in terms of global patterns. Yet, we demonstrated that simulation models of pedestrian movement in cities should be at least based on empirical data at the average sample-level to inform urban planners about areas prone to high volumes of pedestrians.

Predicting the Quality of Spatial Learning via Virtual Global Landmarks.

Analyzing the effects landmarks have on spatial learning is an active area of research in the study of human navigation processes and one that is key to understanding the links between human brain dynamics, landmark encoding, and spatial learning outcomes. This article presents a study on whether electroencephalography (EEG) signals related to virtual global landmarks combined with deep learning can be used to predict the accuracy and efficacy of spatial learning. Virtual global landmarks are silhouettes of actual landmarks projected into the navigator's vision via a heads-up display. They serve as a notable frame of reference in addition to the local landmarks we all typically use for route navigation. From a mobile virtual reality scenario involving 55 participants, the results of the study suggest that the EEG data associated with those who were exposed to global landmarks shows a visibly better capacity for predicting the quality of spatial learning levels than those who were not. As such, the EEG features associated with processing VGLs have a greater functional relation to the quality of spatial learning. This finding opens up a future direction of enquiry into landmark encoding and navigational ability. It may also provide a potential avenue for the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.

Corrections to "Predicting the Quality of Spatial Learning via Virtual Global Landmarks".

In the above article [1], we detected an error in reporting the 10-fold cross-validation result. The correct 10-fold cross-validation result in Table IV is uploaded in this letter.

The acquisition of survey knowledge for local and global landmark configurations under time pressure

ABSTRACTThe influence of stress states on cognition is widely recognized. However, the manner in which stress affects survey knowledge acquisition is still unresolved. For the present study, we investigated whether survey knowledge acquisition during a stressful task (i.e., under time pressure) is more accurate for the mental representation of global or local landmarks. Participants navigated through virtual cities with a navigation aid and explicit learning instructions for different landmark configurations. Participants’ judgments of relative direction (JRDs) suggest that global landmark configurations were not represented more accurately than local landmark configurations and that survey knowledge acquisition was not impaired under time pressure. In contrast to prior findings, our results indicate the limitations of the utility of global landmarks for spatial knowledge acquisition.

The Human Retrosplenial Cortex and Thalamus Code Head Direction in a Global Reference Frame.

Spatial navigation is a multisensory process involving integration of visual and body-based cues. In rodents, head direction (HD) cells, which are most abundant in the thalamus, integrate these cues to code facing direction. Human fMRI studies examining HD coding in virtual environments (VE) have reported effects in retrosplenial complex and (pre-)subiculum, but not the thalamus. Furthermore, HD coding appeared insensitive to global landmarks. These tasks, however, provided only visual cues for orientation, and attending to global landmarks did not benefit task performance. In the present study, participants explored a VE comprising four separate locales, surrounded by four global landmarks. To provide body-based cues, participants wore a head-mounted display so that physical rotations changed facing direction in the VE. During subsequent MRI scanning, subjects saw stationary views of the environment and judged whether their orientation was the same as in the preceding trial. Parameter estimates extracted from retrosplenial cortex and the thalamus revealed significantly reduced BOLD responses when HD was repeated. Moreover, consistent with rodent findings, the signal did not continue to adapt over repetitions of the same HD. These results were supported by a whole-brain analysis showing additional repetition suppression in the precuneus. Together, our findings suggest that: (1) consistent with the rodent literature, the human thalamus may integrate visual and body-based, orientation cues; (2) global reference frame cues can be used to integrate HD across separate individual locales; and (3) immersive training procedures providing full body-based cues may help to elucidate the neural mechanisms supporting spatial navigation. In rodents, head direction (HD) cells signal facing direction in the environment via increased firing when the animal assumes a certain orientation. Distinct brain regions, the retrosplenial cortex (RSC) and thalamus, code for visual and vestibular cues of orientation, respectively. Putative HD signals have been observed in human RSC but not the thalamus, potentially because body-based cues were not provided. Here, participants encoded HD in a novel virtual environment while wearing a head-mounted display to provide body-based cues for orientation. In subsequent fMRI scanning, we found evidence of an HD signal in RSC, thalamus, and precuneus. These findings harmonize rodent and human data, and suggest that immersive training procedures provide a viable way to examine the neural basis of navigation.

Effects of Habitat and Social Complexity on Brain Size, Brain Asymmetry and Dentate Gyrus Morphology in Two Octodontid Rodents

Navigational and social challenges due to habitat conditions and sociality are known to influence dentate gyrus (DG) morphology, yet the relative importance of these factors remains unclear. Thus, we studied three natural populations of O. lunatus (Los Molles) and Octodon degus (El Salitre and Rinconada), two caviomorph species that differ in the extent of sociality and with contrasting vegetation cover of habitat used. The brains and DG of male and female breeding degus with simultaneous information on their physical and social environments were examined. The extent of sociality was quantified from total group size and range area overlap. O. degus at El Salitre was more social than at Rinconada and than O. lunatus from Los Molles. The use of transects to quantify cover of vegetation (and other physical objects in the habitat) and measures of the spatial behavior of animals indicated animal navigation based on unique cues or global landmarks is more cognitively challenging to O. lunatus. During lactation, female O. lunatus had larger brains than males. Relative DG volume was similar across sexes and populations. The right hemisphere of male and female O. lunatus had more cells than the left hemisphere, with DG directional asymmetry not found in O. degus. Degu population differences in brain size and DG cell number seemed more responsive to differences in habitat than to differences in sociality. Yet, large-sized O. degus (but not O. lunatus) that ranged over larger areas and were members of larger social groups had more DG cells per hemisphere. Thus, within-population variation in DG cell number by hemisphere was consistent with a joint influence of habitat and sociality in O. degus at El Salitre.

Orientation information in wayfinding instructions: evidences from human verbal and visual instructions

Although the importance of landmarks for human navigation and for orientation is well accepted, most of today’s navigation systems hardly incorporate any landmark information or information supporting orientation. Different from previous research that only addressed turn-by-turn instructions in verbal forms and landmarks at decision points, the present study provides empirical evidence that human-generated wayfinding instructions are not solely turn-by-turn but the majority of instructions provide orientation information. We propose a new classification scheme for identifying information in wayfinding instructions that will not only support orientation but also facilitate construction of mental map. We explored and compared two forms of representations—visual sketch map and verbal instructions. Results revealed that landmark information is important in human wayfinding instructions with particular importance of local landmarks along the route and global landmarks that support orientation. In addition, sketch maps contained more global landmarks than verbal instructions. In contrast to turn-by-turn navigation, we found that many instructions in human route descriptions do not always refer to turning actions but to orientation. We conducted interviews with a set of raters on what they consider helpful information in both forms of representations. These results confirmed our findings and supported that future route descriptions can be more meaningful and helpful when they are enriched with orientation information as they conform to how humans structure wayfinding instructions.

Spatial Preposition Use in Indoor Scene Descriptions

GIScience 2016 Short Paper Proceedings Spatial Preposition Use in Indoor Scene Descriptions S. A. Doore, M.K. Beard, N.A. Giudice Spatial Informatics, School of Computing and Information Science, University of Maine Email: {stacy.doore@maine.edu, beard@spatial,maine.edu, nicholas.giudice@maine.edu} Abstract In order to provide accurate automated scene description and navigation directions for indoor space, human beings need intelligent systems to provide an effective cognitive model. Information provided by the structure and use of spatial prepositions is critical to the development of accurate and effective cognitive models. Unfortunately, the use and choice of spatial prepositions in natural language is extremely varied, presenting difficulties for natural language systems attempting to provide descriptions of indoor scenes and wayfinding directions. The goal of the present study is to better understand how humans use spatial prepositions to communicate spatial relationships within virtual environment (VE) indoor scenes. A series of experiments investigates spatial preposition use and the influence scale, topology, orientation and distance within indoor scene descriptions and preliminary results are reported. 1. Introduction Humans perceive and represent information differently for indoor spaces than they do for outdoor spaces (Guidice, Walton and Worboys 2010). Indoor spaces usually lack established distance and direction metrics, global landmarks, explicit route-networks, and cover a range of spatial scales from small rooms to large airports (Winter 2012). Our interest is in creating an indoor spatial description system to assist navigation in indoor environments. This research investigates natural language (NL) structures for describing objects and structural features within vista scale (Montello 1993) virtual environment (VE) indoor scene descriptions. We examine how spatial preposition choice may vary in different contextual settings and which spatial prepositions might yield more effective spatial representations with an increased ability to support spatial behaviors (e.g., object location and navigation). This paper describes early work investigating how spatial factors such as room size, scene elements, and object/structure relationships impact spatial preposition use and semantics for indoor scene descriptions. Previous research has found these same variables of topology, scale, orientation and distance impact spatial preposition use in geographic and table top spatial settings. The current study focuses specifically on vista scale VE scenes (i.e., 10’by 12’ and 20’ by 30’) that one might encounter in common built environments (e.g., home, business, or school size rooms). 2. Motivation Consider two spatial expressions describing the same indoor scene: Speaker 1: “The bookcase is against the wall, beyond the table, just to your left.” Speaker 2: “The bookcase is to the left of the window, directly in front of you.” In both cases, the speakers use the bookcase as the focus of the spatial description, however, the statements differ in how the bookcase is spatially situated in the scene. The first speaker uses the wall as the primary spatial landmark, whereas, the second speaker uses the window.

Rail Vehicle Localization Exploiting Rail Track Georeferenced Coordinates

A novel dead reckoning algorithm conceived for localization of small inspection rail vehicles in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) denied environments is presented. This work focus on simplifying the rail vehicle localization task, taking into account restrictions on movement imposed by the railroad tracks. Considering that dead reckoning techniques accumulate errors over time, leading to increasing global uncertainty, a method was designed to correct the estimates and also smooth trajectory errors backwards in time, through visualization of global landmarks. Results show the effectiveness of this approach in reducing long-term position errors. The current document reports real railroad experiments, featuring a specially designed non-motorized mobile modeling vehicle.

Configurational salience of landmarks: an analysis of sketch maps using Space Syntax.

We conducted a visibility graph analysis (a Space Syntax method) of a virtual environment to examine how the configurational salience of global and local landmarks (i.e., their relative positions in the environment) as compared to their visual salience affects the probability of their depiction on sketch maps. Participants of two experimental conditions produced sketch maps from memory after exploration with a layout map or without a map, respectively. Participants of a third condition produced sketch maps in parallel to exploration. More detailed sketch maps were produced in the third condition, but landmarks with higher configurational salience were depicted more frequently across all experimental conditions. Whereas the inclusion of global landmarks onto sketch maps was best predicted by their size, both visual salience and isovist size (i.e., the area a landmark was visible from) predicted the frequency of depiction for local landmarks. Our findings imply that people determine the relevance of landmarks not only by their visual, but even more by their configurational salience.

The Unsung of the Canon: Does a Global Architectural History Need New Landmarks?

Over the past two decades, global history has grown into an increasingly well-recognized and popular field of study with its own journal, conferences and publications. As revealed in the wide and lively debate in the field, however, what global history precisely entails and how it differs from other innovative approaches (such as “new” world history or transnational history) is far from clear or settled. For many scholars, global history is merely a variant of a long tradition of world histor...

Gender differences in wayfinding in virtual environments with global or local landmarks

This study assesses gender differences in wayfinding in environments with global or local landmarks by analyzing both overall and fine-grained measures of performance. Both female and male participants were required to locate targets in grid-like virtual environments with local or global landmarks. Interestingly, the results of the two overall measures did not converge: although females spent more time than males in locating targets, both genders were generally equivalent in terms of corrected travel path. Fine-grained measures account for different aspects of wayfinding behavior and provide additional information that explains the divergence in overall measures; females spent less time traveling away from the target location, a higher proportion of time not traversing, and made more rotations when stopping than males did. Rather than unequivocally supporting male superiority in wayfinding tasks, both the overall and fine-grained measures partially indicate that males and females are differentially superior when using global and local landmark information, respectively. To summarize, males moved faster than females but did not necessarily navigate the spatial surroundings more efficiently. Each gender showed different strengths related to wayfinding; these differences require the application of both overall and fine-grained measures for accurate assessment.

Large scale homing in honeybees.

Honeybee foragers frequently fly several kilometres to and from vital resources, and communicate those locations to their nest mates by a symbolic dance language. Research has shown that they achieve this feat by memorizing landmarks and the skyline panorama, using the sun and polarized skylight as compasses and by integrating their outbound flight paths. In order to investigate the capacity of the honeybees' homing abilities, we artificially displaced foragers to novel release spots at various distances up to 13 km in the four cardinal directions. Returning bees were individually registered by a radio frequency identification (RFID) system at the hive entrance. We found that homing rate, homing speed and the maximum homing distance depend on the release direction. Bees released in the east were more likely to find their way back home, and returned faster than bees released in any other direction, due to the familiarity of global landmarks seen from the hive. Our findings suggest that such large scale homing is facilitated by global landmarks acting as beacons, and possibly the entire skyline panorama.

The effect of landmark and body-based sensory information on route knowledge

Two experiments investigated the effects of landmarks and body-based information on route knowledge. Participants made four out-and-back journeys along a route, guided only on the first outward trip and with feedback every time an error was made. Experiment 1 used 3-D virtual environments (VEs) with a desktop monitor display, and participants were provided with no supplementary landmarks, only global landmarks, only local landmarks, or both global and local landmarks. Local landmarks significantly reduced the number of errors that participants made, but global landmarks did not. Experiment 2 used a head-mounted display; here, participants who physically walked through the VE (translational and rotational body-based information) made 36% fewer errors than did participants who traveled by physically turning but changing position using a joystick. Overall, the experiments showed that participants were less sure of where to turn than which way, and journey direction interacted with sensory information to affect the number and types of errors participants made.