Cognitive Evaluation of Spatial Formalisms: Intuitive Granularities of Overlap Relations

Jan Oliver Wallgrün, Jinlong Yang and Alexander Klippel
Additional contact information
Jan Oliver Wallgrün: Department of Geography, GeoVISTA Center, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA
Jinlong Yang: Department of Geography, GeoVISTA Center, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA
Alexander Klippel: Department of Geography, GeoVISTA Center, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA

International Journal of Cognitive Informatics and Natural Intelligence (IJCINI), 2014, vol. 8, issue 1, 1-17

Abstract: The authors present four human behavioral experiments to address the question of intuitive granularities in fundamental spatial relations as they can be found in formal spatial calculi. These calculi focus on invariant characteristics under certain (especially topological) transformations. Of particular interest to this article is the concept of two spatially extended entities overlapping each other. The overlap concept has been extensively treated in Galton's mode of overlap calculus (Galton, 1998). In the first two experiments, the authors used a category construction task to calibrate this calculus against behavioral data and found that participants adopted a very coarse view on the concept of overlap and distinguished only between three general relations: proper part, overlap, and non-overlap. In the following two experiments, the authors changed the instructions to explicitly address the possibility that humans could be swayed to adopt a more detailed level of granularity, that is, the authors encouraged them to create as many meaningful groups as possible. The results show that the three relations identified in the first two experiments (overlap, non-overlap, and proper part) are very robust and a natural level of granularity across all four experiments. However, the results also reveal that contextual factors gain more influence at finer levels of granularity.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://services.igi-global.com/resolvedoi/resolve. ... 18/ijcini.2014010101 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:igg:jcini0:v:8:y:2014:i:1:p:1-17

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Cognitive Informatics and Natural Intelligence (IJCINI) is currently edited by Kangshun Li

More articles in International Journal of Cognitive Informatics and Natural Intelligence (IJCINI) from IGI Global
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journal Editor ().