Towards Cognitive Adequacy of Topological Spatial Relations

Qualitative spatial reasoning is often considered to be akin to human reasoning. This, however, is mostly based on the intuition of researchers rather than on empirical data. In this paper we continue our eeort in empirically studying the cognitive adequacy of systems of topo-logical relations. As compared to our previous empirical investigation KRR97], we partially lifted constraints on the shape of regions in con-gurations that we presented subjects in a grouping task. With a high level of agreement, subjects distinguished between diierent possibilities of how spatial regions can touch each other. Based on the results of our investigation, we propose to develop a new system of topological relations on a ner level of granularity than previously considered.