The ingredients of an exosomatic cognitive map: isovists, agents and axial lines?

There is some evidence that an axial map, as used in space syntax, may be related to an underlying cognitive map in humans. However, the axial map is derived strictly from the mathematical configuration of space rather than any property of people. Hence there is a question of how a person might have embedded such a map. In this paper we report the results of several experiments which aim to improve the correlation between agent and pedestrian movement.We use a database of external occlusion points derived from isovists constructed throughout the system to provide a lookup table for agents to guide their movement. Since the table is external to the agents, we refer to the visual architecture as exosomatic. The results do improve on previous studies, but are still far from a good simulation of pedestrian movement. However, there is a philosophically important outcome from the experiments. When the agents are tuned to best performance, their movement patterns correspond to the axial structure of the system. This can be shown to be a mathematical result of their movement strategy; that is, the manifestation of movement, or the `memory' of an agent experiment, relates to the combination of the internal structure of the agent and its engagement with the environment in the form of an axial map. There are two unresolved steps from the relationship between individual and environment to human cognition: one, it cannot be shown that people do actually use occlusion points for movement, and two, even if they were to, it cannot be shown that they would use the resultant axial structure for higher level navigation decisions. Nevertheless, our results do provide evidence for a link between the individual and the axial map through embodiment of an agent-environment system, and our theory provides a mechanism for a link between the embodied map and preconditions for cognitive structure, which may in turn provide a basis for the future research into the means by which space syntax may be related to spatial cognition.

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