Externalizing Virtually Perceived Spatial Cognitive Maps

Cognitive maps are cartographic illustrations of a person´s internal representation of the spatial environment in which they live. All of us do form and use cognitive maps, whether in real or virtual space, to deal with and process the information contained in the surrounding environment. Cognitive maps help in visualizing the positional and location details and also the route map for reaching the destination from the current location. Quality of such visualizations directly depends on the quality of the cognitive maps. Thus a human being´s spatial behavior relies upon, and is determined by the individual´s cognitive map of the surrounding environment. One major deprivation in the life of visually impaired and the blind people is the access to information and visualization, as a result of which navigation and orientation ability as well as the ability to perceive surrounding environment reduces. This paper describes a technique and related experiments for acquisition of spatial knowledge (and thereby development of cognitive maps) of a building or a locality by visually impaired and the blind people through training in computer-simulated (virtual) environments. These might be places such as a school, a university campus or a shopping center. Our system allows them to navigate virtually and is able to record navigation path of participants. An algorithm is also presented for finding optimal path between places using boundary relation heuristic. Special emphasis is placed on online assessment (using various statistical measures) of cognitive maps formed by participants after walking through virtual environments. Preliminary results indicate that (1) bi-dimensional regression analysis is more useful than other methods to assess the configural relations between cognitive and actual maps and (2) most of participants were able to create precise cognitive maps after getting trained in virtual environments.