Qualitative representation of the course of motion: Cognitive and psychophysical foundations

Wilfried Brauer*, Kerstin Schill⁺, Florian Röhrbein⁺, Alexandra Musto*

TU München*, Department of Computer Science; and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München⁺,  Institute of Medical Psychology

Duration: 1996 - 2002

Project homepage : http://wwwbrauer.in.tum.de/gruppen/kikog/projects/sppraum/project.html
 

A basic requirement for the interaction of cognitive agents with their environment is the ability to perceive dynamical scenes, i.e., situations changing both in space and time. The goal of our interdisciplinary collaboration is to study the representation of the course of motion both "bottom-up'' through psychophysical experimentation and modeling of the spatio-temporal internal structures, and "top-down'' by developing a qualitative representational framework. Issues are, among others, the measurement of elementary incremental thresholds for the discrimination of spatio-temporal patterns, the modeling of the processing of such patterns within subsequent hierarchical layers, their representation in a scale independent form, and the corresponding qualitative reasoning mechanisms.

Approaches: empirical investigation; modeling
Areas of Research: cognitive science; artificial intelligence; psychophysics
Topics: motion/ dynamic change; qualitative knowledge; spatial reasoning
 

Project publications

Publications of project cooperations:

C - Axiomatics
F - Robot Navigation