A Cognitive Assessment of Topological Spatial Relations: Results from an Empirical Investigation

Whether or not a formal approach to spatial relations is a cognitively adequate (the term will be explicated in this paper) model of human spatial knowledge is more often based on the intuition of the researchers than on empirical data. In contrast, the research reported here is concerned with an empirical assessment of one of the three general classes of spatial relations, namely topological knowledge. In the reported empirical investigation, subjects had to group numerous spatial configurations consisting of two circles with respect to their similarity. As is well known, such tasks are solved on the basis of underlying spatial concepts. The results were compared with the RCC-theory and Egenhofer’s approach to topological relations and support the assumption that both theories are cognitively adequate in a number of important aspects.