Representation and computation of human intuitive spatiotemporal concepts as mental imagery

Abstract

Nowadays, location measurement systems like GPS are widely utilized to acquire locations in the global coordinates system and have already been applied to location-aware systems of practical use such as vehicle-navigation systems. It is, however, not very common for people to refer to these coordinates but intuitive spatial relations such as `at', `around', `along', etc. in their casual communication. Such natural concepts are considered to reflect human cognitive activities toward the world. Therefore they can be subjective to each human individual but as well can be common to the human beings in the macroscopic qualities of their conceptualization. This paper describes a method for systematic representation and computation of human intuitive spatiotemporal concepts as mental imagery.