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Abstract

We report new findings about the mental representation of direction concepts and how these findings may revise for-mal models of spatial reasoning and navigation assistance systems. Research on formal models of direction concepts has a long tradition in AI. While early models where de-signed for unstructured space, for example, reasoning about cardinal directions, research on the influence of context has questioned the universal applicability of these models; mental direction concepts in city street networks differ from those in sea or air navigation. We investigated direc-tion concepts at intersections in city street networks by using methods from cognitive psychology for eliciting con-ceptual knowledge. The results are used to modify the di-rection concepts employed in our wayfinding assistance framework. Within this framework it is possible to use ab-stract conceptualizations and to externalize them in differ-ent formats, for example, verbal or pictorial. Hence, this research may influence both, verbal and pictorial route directions and, additionally, the transfer from one into the other.