Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Modeling the meaning and use of linguistic expressions describing spatial relationships holding between a target object and a landmark object requires an understanding of both the consistency and variation in human performance in this area. Previous research [Herskovits 1985] attempts to account for some of this variation in terms of the angular deviation holding among objects in thevisual display. This approach is shown to fail to account for the full range of human variation inperformance, and a specific alternative algorithm is offered which is grounded in task variability and the notions of corridor and centroid. The significance to this algorithm of task variation, of theseparation of semantic from pragmatic issues, and of the role of function and structure is discussed