Thomas Barkowsky – författare

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Spatial Cognition, Spatial Cognition 2014, held in Bremen, Germany, in September 2014. The 27 revised full papers presented in this book were carefully selected and reviewed from 53 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on spatial memory; language and communication; wayfinding and navigation; computational models; diagrams and maps; technical approaches; and spatial ability.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Spatial Cognition, Spatial Cognition 2014, held in Bremen, Germany, in September 2014. The 27 revised full papers presented in this book were carefully selected and reviewed from 53 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on spatial memory; language and communication; wayfinding and navigation; computational models; diagrams and maps; technical approaches; and spatial ability.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 13th Biennial Conference, KogWis 2016, held in Bremen, Germany, in September 2016, and the 10th International Conference, Spatial Cognition 2016, held in Philadelphia, PA, USA, in August 2016.The 11 revised full papers presented in this book were carefully selected and reviewed from 20 submissions. They focus on the following topics: spatial ability; wayfinding and navigation; spatial memory; and systems and simulations.

In cognitive science, mental representations of spatial knowledge are metaphorically referred to as cognitive maps. However, investigations in cognitive psychology reveal that the cognitive map metaphor is inadequate and that more suitable conceptions of human spatial knowledge processing are needed.This book addresses mental processing of knowledge about geographic space from an AI point of view by presenting an experimental computational modeling approach. Results about human memory and visual mental imagery from cognitive psychology are combined with AI techniques of spatial and diagrammatic knowledge processing. The author develops the diagrammatic reasoning architecture MIRAGE as a comprehensive conception of human geographic knowledge processing.

This is the fourth volume in a series of books dedicated to basic research in spatial cognition. Spatial cognition is a field that investigates the connection between the physical spatial world and the mental world. Philosophers and researchers have p- posed various views concerning the relation between the physical and the mental worlds: Plato considered pure concepts of thought as separate from their physical manifestations while Aristotle considered the physical and the mental realms as two aspects of the same substance. Descartes, a dualist, discussed the interaction between body and soul through an interface organ and thus introduced a functional view that presented a challenge for the natural sciences and the humanities. In modern psych- ogy, the relation between the physical and the cognitive space has been investigated using thorough experiments, and in artificial intelligence we have seen views as diverse as ‘problems can be solved on a representation of the world’ and ‘a representation of the world is not necessary. ’ Today’s spatial cognition work establishes a correspondence between the mental and the physical worlds by studying and exploiting their interaction; it investigates how mental space and spatial “reality” join together in understanding the world and in interacting with it. The physical and representational aspects are equally important in this work. Almost all topics of cognitive science manifest themselves in spatial cognition.

This is the fourth volume in a series of books dedicated to basic research in spatial cognition. Spatial cognition is a field that investigates the connection between the physical spatial world and the mental world. Philosophers and researchers have p- posed various views concerning the relation between the physical and the mental worlds: Plato considered pure concepts of thought as separate from their physical manifestations while Aristotle considered the physical and the mental realms as two aspects of the same substance. Descartes, a dualist, discussed the interaction between body and soul through an interface organ and thus introduced a functional view that presented a challenge for the natural sciences and the humanities. In modern psych- ogy, the relation between the physical and the cognitive space has been investigated using thorough experiments, and in artificial intelligence we have seen views as diverse as ‘problems can be solved on a representation of the world’ and ‘a representation of the world is not necessary. ’ Today’s spatial cognition work establishes a correspondence between the mental and the physical worlds by studying and exploiting their interaction; it investigates how mental space and spatial “reality” join together in understanding the world and in interacting with it. The physical and representational aspects are equally important in this work. Almost all topics of cognitive science manifest themselves in spatial cognition.

This is the fifth volume in a series of book publications featuring basic interdisciplinary research in spatial cognition. The study of spatial cognition is the study of knowledge about spatial properties of objects and events in the world. Spatial properties include location, size, distance, direction, separation and connection, shape, pattern, and so on. Cognition is about the structures and processes of knowledge: its acquisition, storage, retrieval, manipulation, and use by humans, nonhuman animals, and machines. Broadly construed, cognitive activities include sensation and perception, thinking, attention, imagery, attitudes, memory, learning, language, and reasoning and problem-solving; the interaction of these activities with motoric (body movement) and affective (emotional) processing is recognized as critically important, as well. Cognition is typically considered to make up much of the activity of the mind. But though the mind is an expression of the structures and processes of the brain and nervous system, it is also an expression of an organism or agent with a physical body that typically exists in a physical and socio-cultural world. Researchers study spatial cognition for several reasons. Spatial cognition plays important roles in most of the domains of knowledge and behavior of sentient beings, including activities associated with biological survival, social interaction, cultural practice, and economic exchange. Attempts to describe, predict, and explain the basic components of spatial cognition and their interrelationships stimulate a host of interesting basic questions about how important parts of reality work.