Iconic Mapping Research Articles

Iconicity in American sign language: concrete and metaphorical applications

American Sign Language (ASL) describes spatial information (e.g., shapes, configurations, movement and location of figures in space) through a productive system of iconic ``classifier'' predicates. Many lexical items denoting concrete objects or actions are derived from the classifier systems many lexical items and non-lexicalized descriptions of abstract objects or actions are derived from the classifier system as well, through metaphorical mappings from the spatial domain to abstract domains. Starting from the ASL data, this paper presents an ``analogue-building'' model of the creation of iconic forms, which can cover spoken-language as well as sign-language iconicity, and a ``double mapping'' analysis of metaphorical iconicity. The double mapping analysis is supported by the existence of signs that share a metaphorical mapping but not an iconic mapping. The data and analyses presented here underscore the importance of space in conceptualizing non-spatial domains.

Fast Indoor Mobile Robot Localization Using Vision and Geometric Maps

A vision and CAD map based architecture for mobile robot localization that uses naturally occurring landmarks of indoor environments is presented. It employs an original iconic map matching technique. This technique limits image processing to a minimum: it does not require extracting geometric features from image and therefore does not include additional errors. Map matching is performed on the image space: instead of extracting features from image, the CAD model is projected over the image. It implicitly handles the matching or correspondence determination problem. Therefore it is efficient and fast and achieves accurate pose estimation. With this architecture our indoor mobile robot is able to navigate at speeds as high as 0.5m/s while maintaining its absolute pose with an accuracy better than five centimeters.

The development of iconic mapping ability in young children

Are young, pre-operational children as limited in their ability to take perspective as their performance in Piaget and Inhelder's (1956) three mountains task suggests? Research using this paradigm has been reviewed by Kurdek (1978) and Liben (1978); and these authors conclude that the task is only fully mastered at adolescence, although the task is made easier by the use of less complex arrays of familiar objects: even preschoolers are successful on these tasks, and it would seem that the nature of developmental trends in children's perceptual perspective taking is very much contingent upon the stimulus array involved. One type of stimulus array which has been employed by geographers investigating this area, but seldom referred to in the developmental psychology literature, is the aerial photograph. We argue that, by presenting preschool children with tasks which involve recognition rather than performance, one can demonstrate that young children have considerable ability to view and interpret the world from a far-from-egocentric perspective. The recognition of objects and geographical areas when presented in an aerial photograph involves rotation from a horizontal to an orthogonal view of the landscape, reduction in scale, and abstraction to semi-iconic signs; and these, it can be argued, are the skills which are developed as the child acquires, respectively, shape constancy, size constancy and a generalized pattern recognition ability. Indeed, so essential are these operations that one could predict that young children should not only be able to interpret aerial photographs, but also be able to work with cartographic maps, once some of their conventions were explained: the cartographic map sharing with the aerial photograph the transformations of projection and reduced