Finding your way: The cognitive science of navigation
Benjamin J. Kuipers, Neil Burgess, Russell A. Epstein, Verner Peter Bingman, Francesca Pazzaglia · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2011
Finding your way: The Cognitive Science of Navigation Benjamin Kuipers ([email protected]) University of Michigan Computer Science & Engineering, 2260 Hayward Street Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109 USA Neil Burgess ([email protected]) UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience 17 Queen Square London WC1N 3AR, U.K. Russell Epstein ([email protected]) Department of Psychology University of Pennsylvania 3720 Walnut St. Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA Verner P. Bingman ([email protected]) Department of Psychology and J.P. Scott Center for Neuroscience, Mind and Behavior Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, Ohio, 43402 USA Francesca Pazzaglia ([email protected]) Department of General Psychology Via Venezia 8 35131 Padova Italy Keywords: navigation, spatial representation, individual differences, wayfinding Motivation One overarching research question in cognitive science concerns how information from perception and memory is processed and integrated in order to achieve robust, efficient, and adaptive behaviour in space, as is necessary in wayfinding. Examining this integration is quite complicated, entailing an understanding of learning strategies, spatial memory representations of static and dynamic relations, perceptual and attentional processes that direct the encoding and maintenance of select information, reasoning and planning processes, communication of spatial information via language or other representational media, the influence of background knowledge, and the development of navigation plans. Due to the complexity of the problem, research in navigation cuts across a diverse set of disciplines, including cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer science, robotics, environmental psychology, developmental psychology, and geography, and ranges from basic research questions to practical applications. This symposium presents research from across these disciplines, and provides a diversified overview of the range of issues involved. Multiple Ontologies for Spatial Mapping and Navigation Benjamin Kuipers Wanting to develop computational models of spatial knowledge including perception and action grounded in the physical world, we found ourselves compelled to build robots. Inspired by the structure of the human cognitive map, we created the Spatial Semantic Hierarchy (SSH), showing how several different ontologies can be used together to represent knowledge of large-scale and small-scale space [1]. The basic SSH uses hill-climbing and trajectory- following control laws to explore the environment even with very limited prior knowledge of sensor semantics, but its knowledge of local space is quite limited. The Hybrid SSH (HSSH) exploits prior knowledge of the sensors to build local metrical maps of small-scale space. These can be abstracted to capture the qualitative decision structure of local space, making it possible to build a global topological