Alex Klippel (Assistant Professor of Geography, Penn State) and our own Dan Montello won the Best Paper Award at the 2007 Conference on Spatial Information Theory, COSIT’07, held September 19-23 outside of Melbourne, Australia (http://cosit.org/). The title of their joint paper, published in the peer reviewed proceedings, was “Linguistic and Nonlinguistic Turn Direction Concepts.” After Alex’s presentation of the paper, it was voted best, beating out the three other most highly rated papers after the peer review process. Both authors received a nice split of Australian Muscat for their efforts. Good on ya, mates!
Klippel, A., & Montello, D. R. (2007). Linguistic and nonlinguistic turn direction concepts. In S. Winter, B. Kuipers, M. Duckham, & L. Kulik (Eds.), Spatial Information Theory. 9th International Conference, COSIT 2007, Melbourne, , September 19-23, 2007 Proceedings (pp. 354–372). Berlin: Springer. Abstract. This paper discusses the conceptualization of turn directions along traveled routes. Foremost, we are interested in the influence that language has on the conceptualization of turn directions. Two experiments are presented that contrast the way people group turns into similarity classes when they expect to verbally label the turns, as compared to when they do not. We are particularly interested in the role that major axes such as the perpendicular left and right axis play—are they boundaries of sectors or central prototypes or do they have two functions: boundary and prototype? Our results support the claim by Crawford et al. (2000) that prototypes in linguistic tasks serve additionally as boundaries in nonlinguistic tasks, i.e., they fulfill a double function. We conclude by discussing implications for cognitive models of learning environmental layouts and route-instruction systems in different modalities.
