Spatial Principles in Control of Focus in Reasoning with Mental Representations, Images, and Diagrams

The effective control of attentional focus is an essential requirement in mental reasoning based on mental models and mental images, as well as in the interaction with external diagrams. In this paper, we argue for spatial organization principles common to various mental subsystems that entail a noncentralistic control of focus. We give a brief overview of mental spatial reasoning and present a review of psychological findings related to cognitive control. We review existing modeling approaches that realize control of focus in imagery, scene recognition, and mental animation. Based on these foundations, we identify basic spatial organizing principles that are shared by the diverse subsystems collaborating in mental spatial reasoning. We discuss the implications of these principles in the framework of a computational modeling approach and give an outline of the conception of control of focus in our computational architecture Casimir.