Urban monuments encompass a wide range of architectural works either intentionally or unintentionally. These works are often salient due to their inherently explicit or hidden components and qualities in the urban context. Therefore, they affect the mental-spatial representations of the environment and make the city legible. However, the ambiguity of effective components often complicates their...

This work investigates whether large-scale indoor layouts can be learned and navigated non-visually, using verbal descriptions of layout geometry that are updated, e.g. contingent on a participant's location in a building. In previous research, verbal information has been used to facilitate route following, not to support free exploration and wayfinding. Our results with blindfolded-sighted par...

This paper addresses the automatic generation of adaptive and cognitively adequate verbal route descriptions. Current automatic route descriptions suffer from a lack of adaptivity to the principles people employ in wayfinding communication, as well as to particular users’ information needs. We enhance adaptivity and cognitive adequacy by supplementing verbal route descriptions with salient geog...

We present a corpus of multimodal spatial descriptions, as commonly occurring in route giving tasks. Participants provided natural spatial scene descriptions with speech and abstract deictic/iconic hand gestures. The scenes were composed of simple geometric objects. While the language denotes object shape and visual properties (e.g., colour), the abstract deictic gestures “placed” objects in ge...

The production of mental images involves processes that overlap with perception and the extent of this overlap may contribute to reality monitoring errors (i.e., images misremembered as actual events). We hypothesised that mental images would be more confused with having actually seen a pictured object than would alternative representations, such as verbal descriptions. We also investigated whe...

In many fields of science human observers have provided verbal descriptions and explanations of various systems. A formal mathematical model is indispensable when we wish to rigorously analyze these systems. In this chapter, we survey some recent results on transforming verbal descriptions into mathematical models using fuzzy modeling. This is a simple and direct approach that offers a unique a...