Abstract
Natural cognitive agents such as humans and animals may frequently solve spatial problems in their environment by manipulating their environment instead of doing all the computation in their head (e.g., untangling a power cable by inspection and direct interaction: pull here, push there). We call this replacement of computational effort from the central processor by direct manipulation strong spatial cognition. Artificial cognitive agents are currently lacking a comparable ability to exploit their spatio-physical environment for efficient problem solving. One main issue with equipping artificial cognitive agents with strong spatial cognition is that the constraints and properties of this type of problem solving are still insufficiently understood. Being tightly embedded in the spatio-physical and temporal surrounding renders strong spatial cognition difficult to assess by traditional methods. This makes it hard to gain an explicit understanding of its nature and to compare it to existing computational approaches. In this paper, we propose to employ models of strong spatial cognition to gain a deeper understanding of this phenomenon and its nature. We created models of an example application of strong spatial cognition to solve the shortest path problem. By considering different approaches for a computational simulation model, our modeling work revealed that (instantaneous) information propagation constitutes a core characteristic of strong spatial cognition. Moreover, modeling facilitated identifying those questions, which seem of major importance for further deepening our understanding of strong spatial cognition.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Freksa, C.: Strong spatial cognition. In: Fabrikant, S.I., Raubal, M., Bertolotto, M., Davies, C., Freundschuh, S., Bell, S. (eds.) COSIT 2015. LNCS, vol. 9368, pp. 65–86. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23374-1_4
Freksa, C., Olteţeanu, A.-M., Barkowsky, T., van de Ven, J., Schultheis, H.: Spatial problem solving in spatial structures. In: Phon-Amnuaisuk, S., Ang, S.-P., Lee, S.-Y. (eds.) MIWAI 2017. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 10607, pp. 18–29. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69456-6_2
Norman, D.: The Design of Everyday Things. Verlag Franz Vahlen GmbH, München (2016)
Kirsh, D.: Embodied cognition and the magical future of interaction design. ACM Trans. Comput. Hum. Interact. (TOCHI) 20(1), 3 (2013)
Braitenberg, V.: Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. MIT Press, Cambridge (1986)
Pfeifer, R., Scheier, C.: Understanding Intelligence. MIT Press, Cambridge (2001)
Gibson, J.: The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Lawrence Erlbaum, New Jersey (1979)
Raubal, M., Moratz, R.: A functional model for affordance-based agents. In: Rome, E., Hertzberg, J., Dorffner, G. (eds.) Towards Affordance-Based Robot Control. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4760, pp. 91–105. Springer, Heidelberg (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77915-5_7
Sloman, A.: Interactions between philosophy and artificial intelligence: the role of intuition and non-logical reasoning in intelligence. Artif. Intell. 2(3–4), 209–225 (1971)
Sloman, A.: Afterthoughts on analogical representations. In: Proceedings of the 1975 Workshop on Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing, pp. 164–168. Association for Computational Linguistics (1975)
Glasgow, J., Narayanan, N.H., Chandrasekaran, B.: Diagrammatic Reasoning: Cognitive and Computational perspectives. MIT Press, Cambridge (1995)
Goel, A.K., Jamnik, M., Narayanan, N.H. (eds.): Diagrammatic Representation and Inference. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 6170. Springer, Heidelberg (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14600-8
Bateman, J.A., Hois, J., Ross, R., Tenbrink, T.: A linguistic ontology of space for natural language processing. Artif. Intell. 174(14), 1027–1071 (2010)
Cohn, A.G., Renz, J.: Qualitative spatial representation and reasoning. Found. Artif. Intell. 3, 551–596 (2008)
Dylla, F., et al.: A survey of qualitative spatial and temporal calculi: algebraic and computational properties. ACM Comput. Surv. (CSUR) 50(1), 7 (2017)
Ghazi-Zahedi, K., Langer, C., Ay, N.: Morphological computation: synergy of body and brain. Entropy 19(9), 456 (2017)
Ghazi-Zahedi, K., Deimel, R., Montúfar, G., Wall, V., Brock, O.: Morphological computation: the good, the bad, and the ugly. In: 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2017, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 24–28 September 2017, pp. 464–469 (2017)
Cooper, R.P.: Modelling High-Level Cognitive Processes. Psychology Press, London (2002). (Contributions: Yule, P.G., Fox, J., Glasspool, D.W. and Cooper, R.P.)
Chuang, T., Fukuda, M.: A parallel multi-agent spatial simulation environment for cluster systems. In: 2013 IEEE 16th International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering. IEEE, December 2013
Ma, Z., Fukuda, M.: A multi-agent spatial simulation library for parallelizing transport simulations. In: 2015 Winter Simulation Conference, WSC. IEEE, December 2015
Furbach, U., Furbach, F., Freksa, C.: Relating strong spatial cognition to symbolic problem solving—an example. arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.04397 (2016)
Acknowledgements
We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and feedback. The research reported in this paper has been partially supported by the German Research Foundation DFG, as part of Collaborative Research Center (Sonderforschungsbereich) 1320 ‘EASE - Everyday Activity Science and Engineering’, University of Bremen (http://www.ease-crc.org/). Research was conducted in subproject P3 - Spatial reasoning in everyday activity.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
van de Ven, J., Fukuda, M., Schultheis, H., Freksa, C., Barkowsky, T. (2018). Analyzing Strong Spatial Cognition: A Modeling Approach. In: Creem-Regehr, S., Schöning, J., Klippel, A. (eds) Spatial Cognition XI. Spatial Cognition 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11034. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96385-3_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96385-3_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-96384-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-96385-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)