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-- Kitajima (2011)Kitajima, M. (2011). Navigation Processes: A Cognitive Scientific Account. Invited Talk at the Hyderabad ACM Chapter and Progress Software, 2011-04-28.
Navigation Processes: A Cognitive Scientific AccountThe New Oxford American Dictionary defines "navigate" as "to plan and direct the route or course of a ship, aircraft, or other form of transportation, esp. by using instruments or maps" or "to sail or travel over (a stretch of water or terrain), esp. carefully or with difficulty." The concepts used in these definitions (e.g., "plan the route" or "sail over terrain") can be rephrased by using more rigorous terms that are appropriate for scientific treatment. "Navigation" refers to a class of activities (i.e., behavior performed by an agent) associated with a goal and is realized by a sequence of state transitions from an initial state. Such transitions may be continuous or discrete. However, the necessary conditions for a behavior to be called "navigation" are the existence of the starting state, the existence of a goal state, and paths from the starting state to the goal state, which the agent takes by changing the current state to the next one. The changes may be passive, mainly initiated by the environment, or active, initiated by the agent's movement. The term "state" includes not only the condition of the environment but also that of the agent, which may be overt or covert. When a state transition occurs, the state of the agent and/or that of the environment change. Navigation may occur in the real world or in the virtual world. With navigation in the real world, the agent's body actually moves in the environment, causing changes in information from the environment and the inner state of the agent (e.g., the degree of accomplishment of the goal and time left for task completion). With navigation in the virtual world (e.g., Web navigation), the environment (e.g., the currently displayed Web page) changes to the next page in response to the agent's click on a hyperlink. This causes an intrinsic state change in the agent as well. In this talk, I will introduce a field study at train stations to demonstrate what people actually do in a real world setting for navigation. Then I will provide a cognitive scientific account for the navigation behavior at train stations, in which I will place emphasis on the role of working memory for carrying out successful and smooth navigation. I continue on another example of navigation in the context of driving a car, focusing on the requirement of navigational information for the driver to make safe and satisfactory driving to be provided by a human navigator or a car navigation system. Here again, the requirement will be considered from the view point of working memory of the driver. Finally, I will discuss how the navigation processes in the real world setting is related to the navigation process in the Web.
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