Project R8 -[CSPACE]


Formal Analysis of Cognitive Complexity in Human Spatial Reasoning


Principal Investigators

Marco Ragni
Thomas Barkowsky
Lars Konieczny

Research Associates

Sven Brüssow
Thomas Fangmeier

Contact

ragni@cognition.uni-freiburg.de

Project Site

http://portal.uni-freiburg.de/cognition/research/projects/current/project-folder/cspace

Summary

Currently, formal approaches and cognitive models that deal with constraint satisfaction problems for spatial domains do not have much in common. The main hindrance lies in the inaccessibility of the human reasoning processes. Therefore, no theoretical basis and no algorithmic specification on how humans reason about spatial problems have been established yet, which would be the foundation for the development of a cognitive complexity theory for human spatial problem solving. Potential applications of such a theory are in the improvement of human-machine interaction tasks. In this project, we address the desideratum of a cognitive complexity theory from a formal and computational side by using methods from artificial intelligence (AI) flanked by behavioral experiments to identify the influence of operations in reasoning and planning.

Subject Areas

Artificial Intelligence
Cognitive Science
Knowledge Representation
Reasoning