Cognitive Aspects: How People Perceive, Memorize, Think and Talk About Landmarks - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 85

As this linear structure will have less impact on route descriptions, since routes
themselves are linear, most research on verbal descriptions so far has looked into
route descriptions. Couclelis [ 30 ] , for example, pointed out the potential to learn
about spatial cognition through the investigation of verbal route descriptions. She
wrote:
Route directions are readily available, natural protocols reflecting the direction givers' cog-
nitive representations of certain critical aspects of their environment. Still, the relationship
between the spoken words and the underlying cognitive structures is far from transparent.
Responding effectively to a non-trivial request for route directions is a complex task during
which different aspects of spatial cognition come into play at different stages. A number of
questions can be raised about that process (p. 133).

Some of the questions we aim to illuminate here.
Yet the linear structure of language will have a stronger impact on location
and configuration descriptions. These descriptions require cognitive strategies to
linearize a mental visual image during the production of the description, and to
recombine to a image by the recipient. Thus, in the following we distinguish
especially route descriptions [ 100 ] , guiding through an environment or to a par-
ticular destination, and place descriptions , answering where questions for objects
or configurations of objects [ 194 ] . For both kinds of research collections of such
descriptions are required, text corpora . However, we are not aware of any test-retest
experiments clarifying whether people produce over time correlated verbal route or
place descriptions, as had been shown for sketches [ 10 ] .

3.4.3.1 Route Descriptions

Route descriptions are essential for sharing spatial knowledge or coordinating
collaboration. We will find that route descriptions are a prime case for the use of
landmarks. Actually, the overwhelming majority of human route descriptions is
preferring references to landmarks over geometric descriptions [ 40 , 142 ] . Thus, a
route instruction “At the next intersection turn right” is far more likely than “Turn
right after 121 m”, even if both descriptions are pragmatically equivalent enabling
an instruction follower to turn at an indicated location [ 54 ] .

To facilitate a comparison of different route instructions Frank [ 54 ] suggested
a concept of pragmatic information content , a term not to be confused with the
well-known entropy-based information content of Shannon and Weaver [ 195 ] .
He writes: “A theory for a measure of pragmatic information content must
account for the fact that different messages may have the same content”—
route instructions of different people lead along the same route—“and that
thesamemessagemayhavedifferentcontent for different recipients”—
route instructions for a pedestrian may be hard to follow by a car driver.

(continued)