Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Grounded Perceptual Schemas: Developmental Acquisition of Spatial Concepts

  • Conference paper
Book cover Spatial Cognition V Reasoning, Action, Interaction (Spatial Cognition 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 4387))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Hand-engineered definitions of spatial categories are increasingly seen as brittle and spatial concepts in human interactions may need to learn these in terms of perceptually grounded “image schemas”. Here, we present a developmental approach for the acquisition of grounded spatial schemas in a perceptual agent. We assume a capability for dynamic visual attention, and perceptual notions of wholeness and proximity. We first learn perceptual-object to linguisticname mappings from simple 2D multi-agent visual streams co-occurring with word-separated utterances. Mutual information based statistical measures are seen to be sufficient to identify nominal participants in a simple discourse, based on a synthetic model of dynamic visual attention. Next, we use this knowledge of nominals to ground the semantics of spatial relations in language.We show that a notion of proximity between perceptual objects is sufficient to obtain a pre-verbal notion of graded spatial poses. Once linguistic data is superimposed on this, simple associative structures lead to distinctions such as “in” or “out”. Finally we also show how this can lead to a model of actions, where verbs are learned along with the associated argument structures.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Bloom, P.: How Children Learn the Meanings of Words. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Bowerman, M.: Learning how to structure space for language: A crosslinguistic perspective. In: Bloom, P., Peterson, M.A., Nadel, L., Garrett, M.F. (eds.) Language and Space, June 1999, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Casasola, M., Cohen, L.B., Chiarello, E.: Six-month-old infants categorization of containment spatial relations. Child Development 74, 679–693 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Cohn, A.G., Hazarika, S.: Qualitative spatial representation and reasoning: An overview. Fundamenta Informaticae 46(1/2), 1–29 (2001)

    MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  5. Coventry, K.R.: Function, geometry, and spatial prepositions: Three experiments. Spatial Cognition and Computation 1, 145–154 (1999)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Edwards, G., Ligozat, G., Gryl, A., Fraczac, L., Moulin, B., Gold, C.M.: A voronoi-based pivot representation of spatial concepts and its application to route descriptions expressed in natural language. In: Proceedings, 7th International Symposium on Spatial Data handling, Delft, The Netherlands, pp. 7B1–7B15 (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Edwards, G., Moulin, B.: Towards the simulation of spatial mental images using the voronoi model. In: IJCAI-95. Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Spatial Expressions, Montreal, Canada (August 19, 1995), pp. 63–74 (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Feist, M.I., Gentner, D.: Factors involved in the user of in and on. In: Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Heider, F., Simmel, M.: An experimental study of apparent behavior. American Journal of Psychology 57, 243–259 (1944)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Ford, D.P.: Learning grammatical constructions in a miniature language from narrated video events. cognitive science  (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Goddard, C., Wierzbicka, A. (eds.): Meaning and Universal Grammar: Theory and Empirical Findings, Amsterdam. John Benjamins [Studies in Language Companion Series, 60], vol. 1 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Itti, L.: Models of Bottom-Up and Top-Down Visual Attention. PhD thesis, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California (January 2000)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Flavell, J.H.: Theory-of-mind development: Retrospect and prospect. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 50, 274–329 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Kohonen, T.: The self-organizing map. Proceedings of the IEEE 78(9), 1464–1480 (1990)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Langacker, R.: Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. 1. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA (1991)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Lockwood, K., Forbus, K., Usher, J.: Spacecase: A model of spatial preposition use. In: Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Stressa, Italy (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Jean, M., Mandler, J.M.: How to build a baby ii: Conceptual primitives. Psychological Review 99, 587–604 (1992)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Mandler, J.M.: Foundations of Mind. Oxford University Press, New York (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Martin, B., Tversky, B.: Segmenting ambiguous events. In: Proceedings of the 25th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society Crucial for our Data-Collection chapter (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Matsakis, P., Wendling, L.: A new way to represent the relative position between area objects. IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 21(7), 634–643 (1999)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Mukerjee, A.: Neat vs scruffy: A review of computational models for spatial expressions. Representation and processing of spatial expressions, 1–37 (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Mukerjee, A., Vaghela, P.B., Shreeniwas, V.: Pre-linguistic verb acquisition from repeated language exposure for visual events. In: Proceedings International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON-2004) (19-22, 2004)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Oates, T., Cohen, P.R., Atkin, M.S., Beal, C.R.: Building a baby. In: Proceedings of the 18th annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 518–522 (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Matsakis, P., Bondugula, R., Keller, J.: Force histograms and neural networks for humanbased spatial relationship generalization. In: Proceedings of Int. Conf. on Neural Networks and Computational Intelligence (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Regier, T.: A model of the human capacity for categorizing spatial relationships. Cognitive Linguistics, 63–88 (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Roy, D.: Integration of speech and vision using mutual information. In: International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing(ICASSP 2000) (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Spelke, E.S.: Principles of object perception. Principles of object perception. Cognitive Science 14, 29–56 (1990)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Steels, L.: Language learning and language contact. In: Workshop Notes of the ECML/MLnet Workshop on Empirical Learning of Natural Language Processing Tasks, ECML 1997, pp. 11–24 (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Vorwerg, C., Socher, G., Fuhr, T., Sagerer, G., Rickheit, G.: Projective relations for 3d space: Computational model, application, and psychological evaluation. In: AAAI/IAAI, pp. 159–164 (1997)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur 208 016, India

    Amitabha Mukerjee & Mausoom Sarkar

Authors
  1. Amitabha Mukerjee
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Mausoom Sarkar
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Sciences, University of Bremen, Enrique-Schmidt-Str. 5, 28359, Bremen, Germany

    Thomas Barkowsky

  2. Department of Psychology, Justus-Liebig University Gießen, Otto-Behaghel-Strasse 10F, 35394, Giessen, Germany

    Markus Knauff

  3. LIMSI-CNRS, Université de Paris-Sud, 91403, Orsay, France

    Gérard Ligozat

  4. Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Daniel R. Montello

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Mukerjee, A., Sarkar, M. (2007). Grounded Perceptual Schemas: Developmental Acquisition of Spatial Concepts. In: Barkowsky, T., Knauff, M., Ligozat, G., Montello, D.R. (eds) Spatial Cognition V Reasoning, Action, Interaction. Spatial Cognition 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4387. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75666-8_13

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75666-8_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-75665-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-75666-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation