Empathy is important for good verbal navigation instructions. The present study examined the relationship betweenverbal route descriptions and personal characteristics of empathy using a verbal navigation task and the Japanese InterpersonalReactivity Index (IRI-J). In the verbal navigation task, participants were presented a maze map and were instructed to provideverbal route instructions to reach a goal, to a person who is lost in the maze. Then, the participants answered a questionnaireabout their own navigation abilities and responded to the IRI-J. The descriptive data were objectively evaluated with reference tothe following three points: types of spatial description (survey or route), consideration for the other person’s point of view, andunambiguity of instruction. We analyzed the relationships between the descriptive traits and scores on the two questionnaires,and found that the three points were good predictors for some empathy-related factors measured by the IRI-J.

This study explores the difficulties in physically realizing linguistic instructions concerning the action of jumping.We carried out a questionnaire on the understandability and physical feasibility of various jumping actions in Japanese, andthen conducted an experiment in which participants were asked to jump according to these instructions. After the physicalperformances the participants were asked to rate the easiness of the actions in a second questionnaire, and the results of thetwo questionnaires were compared. The results show that the understandability of the instructions and the participants’ beliefsabout the physical feasibility of the instructions were closely correlated. However, the results of the two questionnaires did notcorrelate. The results suggest that although participants believe they can convert jump instructions into physical performancesif the instructions are easy to understand, there are some gaps between the understandability of the linguistic instructions andthe physical realization of them.