Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.