Cognitive Properties of Topological Spatial Relations

Abstract

It has always been a motivation for qualitative reasoning in general and qualitative spatial reasoning in particular that the ways of representing and reasoning about knowledge in these fields are considered to be similar to the ways of human cognition. In many cases, however, this purely relies on the researchers intuition rather than on actual empirical data. As Cohn [26,p.22] wrote in his overview article on qualitative spatial reasoning, “An issue which has not been much addressed yet in the QSR literature is the issue of cognitive validity — claims are often made that qualitative reasoning is akin to human reasoning, but with little or no empirical justification.” This is particularly true for the topological calculi described in Chapter 4 which are studied throughout this work. Although Randell et al. [138] and Egenhofer [44] identified the same set of eight topological relations using completely different approaches, and there thus seems to be a natural agreement about what is a reasonable level of granularity of topological relations, there is no indication so far that these relations are also interesting from a cognitive point of view.