I6-[NavTalk] - Details

Human Spatial Inference in Navigation and Language

Adult humans navigating in buildings and street networks do not perceive their surroundings with a blank mind; rather, previous experience leads to systematic expectations both about the structure of certain types of environment, and the options for navigating in them. Such mental presuppositions supplement the information that wayfinders actually receive via perceiving the real world, and via maps, signs, and linguistic descriptions. Inference processes may be partly subconscious as well as probabilistic and support the wayfinders’ task of navigating in partially unknown environments.

The incomplete spatial information is extended by standard expectations together with spatial reasoning. Together, these processes add up to the development of a (partial) cognitive map, guiding the wayfinder’s subsequent navigation decisions. This procedure may be encouraged or discouraged by particular environmental features or types of information provided to the wayfinder. Our aim in the project I6-[NavTalk] is to gain a better understanding of these spatial inference processes by investigating human behavior and linguistic representations given different types of tasks, environments, and verbal and visual route information. Naturalistic navigation experiments address inferences made between floors in multi-level buildings with respect to local route choices and detour planning, pragmatic solutions found across different tasks, inference and reasoning processes in inconsistent (virtual) environments, and the impact of varying types of input in the form of language-based route descriptions and maps. The behavioral results of these navigation experiments will be analyzed in tandem with language data collected via think-aloud protocols and retrospective reports. In addition to a basic content analysis we will also investigate the structural features of the language data, which are expected to be systematically related to the underlying conceptual phenomena. The systematic combination of linguistic and behavioral analysis will lead to a better understanding of the cognitive processes involved in wayfinding tasks with incomplete knowledge.