Route Descriptions Research Articles

Spatial description learning in preschoolers: The role of perspective and individual factors

Preschoolers’ ability to form mental spatial models derived from descriptions, and their individual skills in relation to these models have been scarcely examined. The present study examines preschoolers’ ability to mentally represent environments based on verbal descriptions from a survey perspective (i.e. landmark locations presented from an aerial view) or route perspective (i.e. a path along which landmarks are encountered from a person’s point of view), and the relationship with the children’s verbal and visuo-spatial abilities. Sixty-three five- to six-year-old children were enrolled. They listened to survey and route descriptions. Then they were assessed on landmark recognition and spatial recall with a landmark location task. Results suggested that these preschoolers could effectively learn environmental information and perform spatial recall tasks well above the chance level, with negligible differences in the survey and route conditions. Vocabulary and mental rotation accuracy were individual measures significantly associated with landmark location accuracy.

Do Aligned Bodies Align Minds? The Partners’ Body Alignment as a Constraint on Spatial Perspective Use

ABSTRACTIn a direction-giving task, we examine whether a high-level constraint—the task partners’ relative body alignment—influences spatial language use and task accuracy. In 32 pairs, task partners interacted in two conditions: for one route description, direction givers (DGs) and direction followers (DFs) sat side-by-side (aligned condition), and for another they sat opposite one another (counter-aligned condition). After each description, DFs drew the route on a map. When pairs were counter-aligned (vs. aligned), DGs increased their use of expressions from a survey perspective, using more frequently terms such as east-west. When counter-aligned, DFs also used more words per conversational turn, which was taken to reflect the increased difficulty of coordinating in that condition. Still, in terms of task performance, the accuracy of DFs’ drawings was unaffected by the partners’ body alignment or spatial language use; it was only predicted by the DGs’ spatial ability. We argue that, because direction giving emphasizes accuracy, task partners invest in strategies that contribute to mutual understanding (e.g., recaps of the route by the DF at the end, evidenced by shifts in language use over time). Thus, body alignment in direction giving impacts coordination difficulty and spatial language use, but it does not singularly influence task performance.

Methods and algorithms for creation of structural schemes of rivers

Methods and algorithms for creation of structural schemes of rivers

The Influence of Spatial Familiarity on Landmark Salience Sensibility Based on Eye Tracking

Abstract. Landmarks play an important role in navigation especially when people in the familiar and unfamiliar environment. These landmarks are usually used for expressing their spatial knowledge. This prior knowledge is related to the spatial familiarity that the spatial knowledge is acquired by individuals as a function of their experience in the environment (Gale et al., 1990). Individuals prefers to take into highly account their familiar route within the environment. Furthermore, the route descriptions include the differed types of landmarks in familiar/unfamiliar routes (Lovelace et al., 1999). The user’s level of spatial familiarity for people is a key factor of how they navigate in the environment (Savage et al., 2012). In human navigation or wayfinding, the dependency on familiar landmarks is the highest priority (Golledge, 2003).Landmarks are more distinguishably salient and prominent than the another spatial features (Sorrows and Hirtle, 1999). Therefore, the landmark salience refers to how easily this prominent spatial feature can be regarded as a landmark (Raubal and Winter, 2002). The landmark salience mainly divided into visual, structural (important location), and cognitive (semantic). Visual salience refers to the visual characteristics of spatial features such as color contrast with surroundings. Some visual characteristics include facade areas, shapes, colors and other properties. Semantic salience refers to the spatial knowledge related features such as a cultural importance of building. Structural salience refers to the spatial features play an important role in the structure of the spatial environment.The level of spatial knowledge of the individual also an important factor in landmark selection (Nuhn and Timpf, 2018). Hamburger and Röser (2014) investigated landmark semantics and showed that famous buildings were better recognized than unfamiliar ones. Quesnot and Roche (2015) found that the familiar individuals prefer the semantic landmarks in environment while the unfamiliar individuals prefer the landmark with the prominent visual and structural. In contrast, people unfamiliar with an environment prefer landmarks with outstanding visual and structural characteristics.The existing literature studies the method that landmark indicators to be considered are not comprehensive while can’t reflect on the landmark characteristics. The reason is that the method of calculation and extraction for landmarks can’t conform the individual preference needs of navigation. Compared with the traditional subjective evaluation method, the eye-tracking method provide objectivity and reliability. For example, a mobile eye tracking system was used by Kiefer et al. (2014) to investigate the process of self-localization. They discovered that test persons directed their attention longer on landmarks on the map and aligned them with objects in the surroundings during successful localization of their own position. Schwarzkopf et al. (2013) used fixed and mobile eye tracking devices to study that participates selected the navigation landmarks in the virtual environment and the real-world of the airport. In general, there are an only limited number of works related to the influence of spatial familiarity on landmark by using eye tracking method.At present, many navigation systems are providing users with route directions under different travel modes. These navigation systems have the "distance-to-turn" method in route directions, however the landmark knowledge has not been conformed to user's habits and spatial cognitive in wayfinding. In order to solve these problems, this paper aims to study the characteristics of the user’s spatial familiarity and landmark salience evaluation method in navigation. The following questions are addressed in this study: 1) What’s the relationship between the spatial familiarity with the landmark selection in navigation for individuals? 2) What is the quantitative evaluation model to connect between the spatial familiarity with the landmark salience by using the eye-tracking data?In our experiments, we will use eye tracking to explore the influence of spatial familiarity on landmark salience. The experimental path is part of the campus area of Nanjing Normal University. The subjects are divided into novice students and senior students from Nanjing Normal University as unfamiliar and familiar groups respectively. The procedures are divided into two parts, namely, the subjects should walk the experimental path within the fixation time and then they are asked to wear VR eye tracking module a Glass DK II special for HTC view (China; https://www.7invensun.com/) to do three types of tasks about landmark picture with the characteristics of visual, semantic and structural. With this research, we expect to establish a landmark salience evaluation method through eye movement data and analyse the landmark selection rules of groups with different spatial familiarity. It is helpful to design the pedestrian navigation system based on landmarks, improve the pertinence and reliability of navigation services and reduce the cognitive load for users.

External Relations of Old Rus’ in the 12th Century

The paper is devoted to the analysis of information about the external relations of Old Rus’ in the geographical treatise of the 12th century Arab scholar al-Idrisi. Unlike other sources, information of which, as a rule, is fragmentary and describes only particular direction of external relations of Old Rus’, in the world geography of al-Idrisi these relations are characterized in almost all directions at once, which allows us to imagine them as a system. Due to the fact that al-Idrisi’s text is built primarily as a “route description”, all his messages about Old Rus’ (with the exception of archaic, borrowed from the authors of the tenth century) are a story about the ways by which Old Rus’ was associated with the outside world. The paper considers information about the relations of Old Rus’ with Poland, the Baltic countries, Cumania (the Polovtsian steppe), as well as its presence in the Black Sea area.

Districting As a Way of Possessing Space

Districting is a means of continuous description and mapping of territory similar to classification and periodization; it connects space fragments with a narrative. The process of division is also called districting, and its result is a grid of areas that are connective and homogeneous, mosaic and zonal, individual and typological, etc. Cognitive districting is the mental conquest of space. Practical districting, which is the division of territory and waterbodies between owners or users, emerged long ago in the animal world. Human society is characterized by the transition from mobile methods (forays, hikes, expeditions, route description) to stable methods (occupation, bureaucracy, administrative-territorial division (ATD), and monitoring). The objectives of applied districting in Russia include improvement of ATD, functional zoning, rotational land use, and regional differentiation of laws, taxes and tariffs. Diverse districting is necessary for flexible regional policies and management.

Designing an Ontology to Describe Ecological Cycling Routes within the Province of Tungurahua

Tourism, a significant industry worldwide, has allowed for economic, social, and cultural development in rural areas because of all the advantages it offers to tourists. Ecuador is a country that presents a wide range of alternatives in the tourist field allowing a massive tourist influx to many of its destinations such as indigenous communities, natural reserves, and tourist, ecological, and volcanic routes. Most importantly, Ecuador encourages the conservation of the diversity resulting from such influx. The objective of this research is to design an ontology which facilitates a description of the bicycle tourist routes in the province of Tungurahua, and specifically in the city of Ambato. Apart from route descriptions, this ontology gives information about the flora and fauna and places of interest such as inns, hotels, and restaurants that can be found along this route. This ontology was developed based on the application and enforcement of semantic web technologies. That being said, all the described information is attached to an RDF vocabulary and it can be accessed using SPARQL. Therefore, information that is semantically described in an organized and standardized manner is available in order to allow for interoperability with other existing data sources. As for the development of the ontology, the methodology used was an open code software known as “protégé”. The OWL (Ontology Web Language) was also used as marked language and RDFS for the description of the employed vocabulary.

Applying the cultural ratchet to a social artefact: The cumulative cultural evolution of a language game

Abstract Material artefacts evolve by cumulative cultural evolution (CCE), the accumulation of adaptive modifications over time. We present a large-scale experiment investigating the CCE of a social artefact in transmission chains, each containing 8 adult human participants (N=408). The social artefact is what Wittgenstein calls a ‘language game', the subset of language used to perform a particular activity; in the present study the language game is to communicate a route on a map. Two social learning conditions were compared: Observational Learning and Social Coordinative Learning. Participants tried to accurately communicate a route on a map to the next person in their transmission chain. Over the experimental generations the routes were reproduced with progressively higher accuracy in both conditions, demonstrating the CCE of the language game. The rate of CCE was comparable across conditions, but route reproduction accuracy was consistently higher in the Social Coordination condition compared to the Observation condition. In both conditions performance improved due to the accumulation of adaptive patterns of verbal route descriptions, and the progressive elimination of non-adaptive patterns. Whereas change in the content of the language game was similar across conditions, change to the communication process differed between the Observation and Social Coordination conditions. In conclusion, like material artefacts, social artefacts, in our case the language game, evolve by cumulative cultural evolution.

RUSSIAN RESEARCH IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA: THE CASE OF VLADIMIR OBRUCHEV'S EXPEDITION TO WEST CHINA, 1892–1894

ABSTRACT Following the growth of Russian political interests in Inner Asia in the mid-19th century, the Russian Imperial Geographical Society (RGS) initiated a series of extensive multi-disciplinary field studies of the region, including areas which now are part of the People's Republic of China. These expeditions aimed to provide the Russian government and academia with detailed information on the region's ethnographic, geological, botanical and other features and also to promote Russian science on an international level. One of the longest expeditions, in terms of both time and distance, was that of Vladimir Obruchev, the future renowned novelist and Soviet academician, who at that time was a young Siberian geologist. In the span of two years beginning in September 1892, he covered a distance of more than 15,000 kilometers inside China. He was inspired by the studies of Ferdinand von Richthofen on loess soils that are found only on the Chinese Loess Plateau. Utilizing the route description from Obruchev's memoir “From Kyakhta to Kuldzha” (1940), the original copies of his field report to the Russian Imperial Geographical Society (1900), and various materials from the archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the library of the Institute of Geography, and the archive of the Russian Imperial Geographical Society, as well as Chinese databases and maps, the author made a detailed geographical and chronological reconstruction of the expedition route and itinerary on the modern map of China. More than 100 places have been identified and those points are available online as an interactive presentation. This contribution also presents a novel approach for studying the history of geographical exploration with all its complexity.

Translokacja eskadronu majora von Granera (4. pułk huzarów ks. Eugena von Württemberg) z Bolesławca do Radomska (1804)

W początkach 1793 r. wojska pruskie wkroczyły do Wielkopolski, II rozbiór Rzeczypospolitej stał się faktem. Z zajętych ziem utworzono niezwłocznie nową prowincję – Prusy Południowe (Südpreussen). Jednym z elementów nowej rzeczywistości była widoczna obecność wojska w przestrzeni społeczno-gospodarczej prowincji. Wiele miast i miasteczek, rzecz niespotykana w okresie przedrozbiorowym, stało się siedzibami garnizonów. Wielokrotnie też oddziały zmieniały miejsca swego postoju. Na terenie departamentu kamery kaliskiej stacjonowały szwadrony 4. pułku huzarów. Jeden z nich, dowodzony przez majora Granera, otrzymał rozkaz translokacji z Bolesławca nad Prosną do Radomska (wrzesień 1804). Przemieszczenie oddziału następowało na podstawie zatwierdzonego przez zwierzchników dokumentu z opisem trasy (Marsch Route).

Speech in Direction-Giving Interactions in L2 English

This cross-sectional study investigates pragmatic developmental patterns of L2 route direction-giving among 36 learners of English. This study draws on speech act theory (Searle, 1976) and politeness theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987). Route direction-giving interactions are structured by initiation, route description, securing, and closing (Wunderlich & Reinelt, 1982). Route descriptions consist of semantic formulas including locative directives, descriptives, and adjuncts. In a simulated direction-giving task, learners interacted with four different addressees with whom they had varying degree of familiarity. A total of 347 direction-giving exchanges were analyzed for directives, descriptives, and adjuncts. The data revealed pragmatic developmental patterns in which the beginning learners relied on simple pre-direction-giving turns, bare imperatives and limited lexical devices. In contrast, the higher-level learners elaborated route descriptions: they established common ground with the interlocutor through predirection-giving utterances, increased the number of descriptives, and coherently organized route directions by using a range of pragmalinguistic resources. Specifically, the learners developed pragmalinguistic knowledge in the use of you+auxiliary types and if-clauses. However, the statistical results showed that all groups were not sensitive to the degree of familiarity with addressees in the use of all locative directives except for an increased use of you+auxiliary types with unknown addressees.

The many routes of mental navigation: contrasting the effects of a detailed and gist retrieval approach on using and forming spatial representations.

Navigated routes can be recalled by remembering a schematic layout or with additional sensory and perceptual details, engaging episodic memory processes. In this study, we contrasted the effects of these remembering approaches on retrieving real-world navigated routes, the impact on flexibly using familiar route information and on learning new spatial representations. In a within-subjects design, participants were oriented to recall familiar routes under two remembering conditions-a detail condition that promoted episodic memory processes and a gist condition in which routes were recalled via schematic processes. In each condition, participants performed two subsequent navigation tasks. They first described solutions to navigation problems that involved the recalled familiar route (e.g., navigating around a road block or to a new destination) andthen learned and recalled a route within a novel spatial environment. All navigation descriptions were scored for the number of spatial references, entities, and sensory descriptions. We report the following findings.First, when describing the familiar routes, more details were generated in the detail condition, but a higher proportion of these details were spatial references in the gist condition. Route descriptions in the gist condition also relied more on egocentric spatial representations than in the detail condition. Next, when solving navigation problems in the familiar environment, solution routes were described with more details in the detail condition and deviated less from the familiar route than in the gist condition. Finally, the detail condition led to the preferential encoding of entity and sensory descriptive details of new spatial representations. These findings suggest that activating episodic processes at retrieval has distinct effects on how familiar information can be flexibly used and how new spatial representations are formed.

Algorithms for the construction and recognition of navigational route descriptions for cartographic computer systems

In the modern world, the integration of computers with robotic devices has been steadily enhanced. This calls for the development of interfaces for the interaction of users with robotic systems. An important part of this task is the transfer of knowledge about the route, which can be passed from the user to a robotic system or from a robotic system to the user. This requires a special format for the route description that can be understandable for the user and can be recognized by the robot. In addition, it is required to personalize the transferred data for each specific user. Presently, there are many systems that partially execute these tasks--these are automobile navigators, applications for mobile and desktop computers, Web applications, etc. Such systems enable its users to find an optimal path and present their results (mainly on a display) as instructions on following the route. Typically, these instructions do not refer to landmarks that are familiar to the user. There is either impossible to input a route into such systems or this possibility is very limited. In this paper, we consider algorithms for the construction and recognition of textual descriptions of a route in the form that is convenient for the users taking into account their cognitive abilities and personal knowledge of surrounding objects.

Gaze behavior during incidental and intentional navigation in an outdoor environment

Previous research on landmark selection and route learning derived many of its conclusions from the analysis of memory tasks and verbal route descriptions. We examined the extent to which these findings are reflected in gaze behavior. Wearing a mobile eye tracking device, participants learned the first part of a real-world route incidentally and the second part intentionally. When compared with incidental learning, intentional learning led to a stronger focus on landmarks at structurally salient locations. In contrast, landmarks with a higher level of visual salience attracted generally more fixation time. This finding remained unaffected by learning intention. Our results support the validity of established theoretical frameworks about landmark selection and route learning by extending them to the level of gaze behavior. Additionally, they provide insight into subtle changes of properties determining a landmark's salience as a result of learning intention.

<p>Route description in Iwaidja: grammar and conceptualisation of motion</p>

This study focussed on the effect of grammar of Iwaidja, an indigenous Australian language, on mathematical conceptualisation. It investigated route description in Iwaidja. Spatial concepts such as direction, height and movement in relation to another object are briefly described using examples. Differences between English and Iwaidja are used to illustrate the some of the impact of grammar on mathematical conceptualisation. The implications are discussed in terms of how understanding these grammatical features can help teachers, especially when children are not fluent in the language of instruction, as well as providing keys to cross-linguistic investigations of mathematical cognition. Descripción de ruta en Iwaidja: gramática y conceptualización del movimiento Este estudio se centró en el efecto de la gramática de iwaidja, una lengua indígena de Australia, en la conceptualización matemática. Se investigó la descripción de ruta en esta lengua. Conceptos espaciales tales como dirección, altura y el movimiento en relación con otro objeto, se describieron utilizando ejemplos. Diferencias entre el inglés y el iwaidja son usadas para ilustrar el impacto de la gramática en la conceptualización matemática. Las implicaciones consideran cómo la comprensión de estas características gramaticales puede ayudar a los maestros, sobre todo cuando los niños no hablan con fluidez el idioma de la instrucción, así como proporcionar claves para investigaciones translingüística de la cognición matemática.Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10481/42390WOS-ESCI

Examining the validity of the total dwell time of eye fixations to identify landmarks in a building

It is uncertain to what extent the duration of eye fixations reflects the use of landmarks during navigation. Therefore, a study was conducted in which eye tracking data and route descriptions were collected of 23 participants who were highly familiar with the indoor test environment. Based on the total fixation time on different landmark categories, two measures were calculated, namely the calculated landmark category use and the probable landmark category use. Based on the ratio between these measures an object was considered to be a landmark or not. The results were then compared with the objects referenced to in written route instructions. It can be concluded that promising results were provided by this method to identify landmarks. This landmark identification criterion strongly reflected the landmarks that came forward in the written route instructions. However, issues related to the identification of structural landmarks remain a problem.

The role of visual and spatial working memory in forming mental models derived from survey and route descriptions.

This study examines the involvement of spatial and visual working memory (WM) in the construction of flexible spatial models derived from survey and route descriptions. Sixty young adults listened to environment descriptions, 30 from a survey perspective and the other 30 from a route perspective, while they performed spatial (spatial tapping [ST]) and visual (dynamic visual noise [DVN]) secondary tasks - believed to overload the spatial and visual working memory (WM) components, respectively - or no secondary task (control, C). Their mental representations of the environment were tested by free recall and a verification test with both route and survey statements. Results showed that, for both recall tasks, accuracy was worse in the ST than in the C or DVN conditions. In the verification test, the effect of both ST and DVN was a decreasing accuracy for sentences testing spatial relations from the opposite perspective to the one learnt than if the perspective was the same; only ST had a stronger interference effect than the C condition for sentences from the opposite perspective from the one learnt. Overall, these findings indicate that both visual and spatial WM, and especially the latter, are involved in the construction of perspective-flexible spatial models.

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.

How directions of route descriptions influence orientation specificity: the contribution of spatial abilities.

Previous studies found mental representations of route descriptions north-up oriented when egocentric experience (given by the protagonist's initial view) was congruent with the global reference system. This study examines: (a) the development and maintenance of representations derived from descriptions when the egocentric and global reference systems are congruent or incongruent; and (b) how spatial abilities modulate these representations. Sixty participants (in two groups of 30) heard route descriptions of a protagonist's moves starting from the bottom of a layout and headed mainly northwards (SN description) in one group, and headed south from the top (NS description, the egocentric view facing in the opposite direction to the canonical north) in the other. Description recall was tested with map drawing (after hearing the description a first and second time; i.e. Time 1 and 2) and South-North (SN) or North-South (NS) pointing tasks; and spatial objective tasks were administered. The results showed that: (a) the drawings were more rotated in NS than in SN descriptions, and performed better at Time 2 than at Time 1 for both types of description; SN pointing was more accurate than NS pointing for the SN description, while SN and NS pointing accuracy did not differ for the NS description; (b) spatial (rotation) abilities were related to recall accuracy for both types of description, but were more so for the NS ones. Overall, our results showed that the way in which spatial information is conveyed (with/without congruence between the egocentric and global reference systems) and spatial abilities influence the development and maintenance of mental representations.

“The Ridge Went North”: Did the Observer Go as Well? Corpus-driven Investigation of Fictive Motion

GIScience 2016 Short Paper Proceedings “The Ridge Went North”: Did the Observer Go as Well? Corpus-driven Investigation of Fictive Motion E. Egorova 1,2 , G. Boo 1 , R.S. Purves 1 Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland Email: {ekaterina.egorova, gianluca.boo, ross.purves}@geo.uzh.ch University Priority Research Programme Language and Space (URPP SpuR), University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland Abstract Fictive motion (“The ridge went north”) can refer to both dynamic (observer is moving) and static (observer is visually scanning) scenes. Using a corpus of alpine narratives, we extract fictive motion constructions and compare those representing static and dynamic scenes. According to our findings, some of the verbs appear exclusively in static (or dynamic) scenes, while others can be found in both and thus require broader context for the correct annotation. The results can be seen as a step towards the automatic identification of the role of geographic objects in text. 1. Introduction Text corpora are increasingly being recognised as a potential source of rich geographic information. However, extracting information from text requires understanding of the ways in which language encodes space (Talmy 2000) and the scope of spatial information reproduced in certain discourse. Thus, route descriptions have been shown to go well beyond straightforward references to displacement through the prototypical go and turn (Allen 2000; Denis 1997; Tversky and Lee 1991) and include instructions of positioning and inspection (Allen 2000; Moncla et al. 2015), exercising caution or remembering a certain geographic object (Egorova et al. 2015), as well as topological information (Denis 1997). An important task in automatic route extraction from text is thus differentiating whether a geographic object is introduced as an element of the actual path or in some other context (e.g. description of a vista at some point of a path). One approach to making this distinction uses verb semantics, where a verb of perception signals description of the geographic object as part of a scene, while a verb of motion indicates movement of the observer with regard to that object. (Moncla et al. 2015). From this perspective, fictive motion (FM) is of central importance. It depicts “the form, orientation, or location of a spatially extended object in terms of a path over the object's extent” (Talmy 2000) and reflects the conceptual primacy of named objects and their configuration in physical space (Matlock and Bergmann 2014; Matsumoto 1996). Crucially, it can take one of the two forms (Langacker 2010; Matsumoto 1996). The first (static) construes the scene as static, observable from a specific point in space, its conceptual roots lying in visual, or mental, scanning by an observer along the feature (“The path rises quickly near the top.” (Langacker 2010)). The second (dynamic) encodes the actual motion of the observer, where the series of immediate fields of view along their path are construed as a single entity moving through space itself (“The path is rising quickly as we climb.” (Langacker 2010)). Distinguishing between these forms is important, since one encodes the movement of the observer, while the other describes the configuration of an object in space. In this study, we explore FM in a corpus of alpine texts addressing the following questions: • Which verbs are used in FM constructions in our corpus?