COGLUNCH: Ariane Tom
		Thursday, May 20th, 12:15 - 1:30
		Cordura Hall, Room 100 (at CSLI)
		with FREE burritos at 12 for the first arrivals

   Contrasting street- and landmark-based directions in wayfinding,
		     Production and memory tasks


     The last fifteen years of research in discourse production and
comprehension has shown a great interest for spatial discourse. This
type of discourse can be seen as a means of externalizing the
interactions between two distinct systems in the human cognitive
architecture, namely the system of spatial representations and the
system of verbal representations. More specifically, many studies
aimed at understanding how people produce and comprehend route
directions.

    There's a consensus on the importance of landmarks in the
production and comprehension of route directions; nonetheless, if the
to-be-described route is situated in a city, the information given can
be either based on street names or on landmarks. These two modes of
guiding a moving person may be unequally efficient, or even impose
different amounts of cognitive load during their processing, resulting
in a poorer memory of the route.

    The series of experiments we conducted attempted to give the first
results on this issue, by combining both real world wayfinding tasks
and lab experiments.  Results we'll report all converge on the better
efficiency of landmarks.

About the Speaker: Ariane Tom is a visiting scholar in the Stanford
Psychology Department.