Cognitive assessment of topological movement Patterns and direction turns: An influence of scale

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.

Spatial relations are considered as one of the most unique aspects of spatial or geographical information and have linked the space and natural language. Many spatial relations represent distance (topological relations) and directional relations. This research discusses the role of topology for the conceptualization of different movement and furthermore to assess the influence of two different scales of spaces on cognitive classes through human subject tests. Two experiments are conducted with two different scales. Each experiment was performed by 20 participants. Experiments were fully based on the grouping paradigm. Grouping task enable to categorize the movement entities into groups and establish the cognitive categories or classes. Entities or movement patterns within a class are assumed to similar to one another but different from the entities in other classes. It is believed that the two scales of space are quite distinct in the ways people see and think about them in their mind (Downs and Stea, 1977). To assess the influence of scale on the cognitive classes, two different scales are assumed i. e bike and city and bike and park. Similarity measure and category construction of different movement patterns are assessed using both scales. All movement patterns were designed through conceptual neighborhood graph. The result of this experiment shows that different movement patterns are distinguished by the topological relations. This study not also presents the importance of the topology for conceptualization and perception of different movement patterns but also the influence of scale to distinguish the different movement pattern and to build cognitive classes. The main finding of this study is that the grouping behavior of Non- tangential proper part is found to be different in both scales. Direction relations are also an important aspect of spatial relations. Human beings use different angular information in their environment and derive information. This study not also assesses the conceptualization of different direction turns but also examine the category construction influenced by the two different scales. This research discusses the category construction of direction turns created in both scales. The results shows that human perceive different angular information and deduce this information. It is also examined that cognitive classes constructed remain same in both scale. Furthermore, linguistic description is also evaluated in this research but not in much detail. Verbal labeling of the groups participant created also gives the idea about the human perception about the two different scales.