A Cognitive Model of Strategies for Cardinal Direction Judgments
SPATIAL COGNITION AND COMPUTATION, 7(2), 179–212 Copyright © 2007, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. A Cognitive Model of Strategies for Cardinal Direction Judgments Leo Gugerty and William Rodes Psychology Department, Clemson University, Clemson, SC ABSTRACT Previous research has identified a variety of strategies used by novice and experienced navigators in making cardinal direction judgments (Gugerty, Brooks, & Treadaway, 2004). We developed an ACT-R cognitive model of some of these strategies that instantiated a number of concepts from research in spatial cognition, including a visual-short-term-memory buffer overlaid on a perceptual buffer, an egocentric ref- erence frame in visual-short-term-memory, storage of categorical spatial information in visual-short-term-memory, and rotation of a mental compass in visual-short-term- memory. Response times predicted by the model fit well with the data of two groups, college students (N D 20) trained and practiced in the modeled strategies, and jet pilots (N D 4) with no strategy training. Thus, the cognitive model seems to pro- vide an accurate description of important strategies for cardinal direction judgments. Additionally, it demonstrates how theoretical constructs in spatial cognition can be applied to a complex, realistic navigation task. Keywords: cardinal directions, cognitive modeling, visual short term memory. INTRODUCTION This project focuses on understanding the cognitive processes and structures people use in making a particular type of navigational judgment—using a map to determine the cardinal direction between two objects in the environment. We first developed a cognitive model of some of the strategies people use in making this type of cardinal direction judgment.
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