Cognitive Aspects: How People Perceive, Memorize, Think and Talk About Landmarks - Landmarks: GIScience for Intelligent Services - page 77

Tabl e 3. 1 Spatial and temporal communication constraints [ 90 ]

Synchronous

Asynchronous

Physical
co-presence

Face-to-face
(human-human),
or real-time mobile
services
(human-computer)

Refrigerator notes,
you-are-here maps,
departure plans at
bus stations

Telepresence Telephone Email, accessing a static

web page

also a remarkable illustration how complex verbal dialog can be, which is just
conveying the position of a line in a diagram. Some of this complexity raises actually
from the differences between the two communicating partners' knowledge of the
environment, which requires negotiations and adjustments of knowledge.

The Map Task. In 1991 the Human Communication Research Centre at the
Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow designed an experiment to collect
a corpus of 128 dialogues about maps. In their experiment two participants
would “sit opposite one another, and each has a map which the other cannot
see. One speaker—designated the instruction giver —has a route marked on
her map; the other speaker—the instruction follower —has no route. The
speakers are told that their goal is to reproduce the Instruction Giver's route on
the Instruction Follower's map. The maps are not identical and the speakers
are told this explicitly at the beginning of their first session. It is, however, up
to them to discover how the two maps differ. The maps were designed as line
drawings with landmarks attached. The landmarks were labelled with names.
A variable in the test was the degree of agreement between the maps, where
differences between the maps could consist of absence of some landmarks
and name changes of landmarks, which also was used to produce ambiguities
by multiple occurrences of a name.

groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/maptask/ , last visited 3/1/2014.

In face-to-face communication non-verbal forms of communication such as
gestures, facial expression or body language can play a role as well. However,
spatial communication is not limited to face-to-face communication. Applying a
schema proposed by Janelle [ 90 ] four levels of spatiotemporal constraints can be
distinguished in human communication in principle (Table 3.1 ) .
In each of these communication situations, spatial knowledge can be shared in
different communication modes. For example, in each situation a map can be shared.
In face-to-face situations both instruction giver and instruction taker can lean over
a map and discuss a route together. In asynchronous, co-located communication the