Human recognition of causal relations is based on recognition of time delay between the cause and the effect . Little, however, is known concerning temporal meaning of causal relations generated by qualitative reasoning systems . Aiming at explicit description of time concepts underlying the models and the causal reasoning engines, this article proposes a causal time ontology which defines a se...

Topological relations between spatial objects are the most important kind of qualitative spatial information. Dozens of relation models have been proposed in the past two decades. These models usually make a small number of distinctions and therefore can only cope with spatial information at a fixed granularity of spatial knowledge. In this paper, we propose a topological relation model in whic...

A new approach to representing qualitative spatial knowledge and to spatial reasoning is presented. This approach is motivated by cognitive considerations and is based on relative orientation information about spatial environments. The approach aims at exploiting properties of physical space which surface when the spatial knowledge is structured according to conceptual neighborhood of spatial r...

A multitude of calculi for qualitative spatial reasoning (QSR) have been proposed during the last two decades. The number of practical applications that make use of QSR techniques is, however, comparatively small. One reason for this may be seen in the difficulty for people from outside the field to incorporate the required reasoning techniques into their software. Sometimes, proposed calculi a...

This study investigates whether viewing human gestures facilitates learning about non-human biological movements and whether correspondence between gesture and to-belearned movement is superior to non-correspondence. Functional near-infrared-spectroscopy was used to address whether gestures activate the human mirror-neuron-system (hMNS) and whether this activation mediates the facilitation of l...

Dealing with spatial and temporal knowledge is an indispensable part of almost all aspects of human activity. The qualitative approach to spatial and temporal reasoning, known as Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Reasoning (QSTR), typically represents spatial/temporal knowledge in terms of qualitative relations (e.g., to the east of, after), and reasons with spatial/temporal knowledge by solving...

Article history: Received 13 March 2010 Received in revised form 22 July 2011 Accepted 25 July 2011 Available online 10 August 2011

Research in analogical transfer suggests a simple type of transfer that occurs due to the activation of key relational concepts. Analysis on mental structured representations indicates that this transfer may act differently depending upon structural and perceptual features of the priming task. Two hundred eight participants were assigned to three experimental groups where they received a struct...

In this paper we present a Qualitative Spatial Reasoning formalism for the treatment of the polysemy of the prepositions “sobre” and “sob”. These prepositions are mainly used to express verticality in the Brazilian Portuguese. Through queries in grammars, we established 22 meanings for these prepositions and then we did a Corpus search to see how these prepositions are used in practice. We obta...

Human data are used to study how people solve complex problems that have spatial and temporal components. Major findings include the use of task-focused representations, unexpectedly tight coupling of representation and search, time and space conflation, and use of multiple concurrent representations. The major contributions of this work include a set of abstract representations that strongly s...