EECS Department, Northwestern University, 2133 Sheridan Rd., Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
Cognition. 2011 Nov;121(2):281-7. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.06.012. Epub 2011 Jul 30.
A fundamental question in human cognition is how people reason about space. We use a computational model to explore cross-cultural commonalities and differences in spatial cognition. Our model is based upon two hypotheses: (1) the structure-mapping model of analogy can explain the visual comparisons used in spatial reasoning; and (2) qualitative, structural representations are computed by people's visual systems and used in these comparisons. We apply our model to a visual oddity task, in which individuals are shown an array of two-dimensional images and asked to the pick the one that does not belong. This task was previously used to evaluate understanding of geometric concepts in two disparate populations: North Americans, and the Mundurukú, a South American indigenous group. Our model automatically generates representations of each hand-segmented image and compares them to solve the task. The model achieves human-level performance on this task, and problems that are hard for the model are also difficult for people in both cultures. Furthermore, ablation studies on the model suggest explanations for cross-cultural differences in terms of differences in spatial representations.
人类认知中的一个基本问题是人们如何推理空间。我们使用计算模型来探索空间认知中的跨文化共性和差异。我们的模型基于两个假设：（1）类比的结构映射模型可以解释用于空间推理的视觉比较；（2）定性的、结构性的表示是由人们的视觉系统计算出来的，并用于这些比较。我们将我们的模型应用于一个视觉异常任务，在该任务中，个体被展示一组二维图像，并被要求挑选一个不属于该组的图像。这个任务以前曾被用于评估两个截然不同的人群对几何概念的理解：北美人，以及南美的 Mundurukú 土著群体。我们的模型自动生成每个手工分割图像的表示，并进行比较以解决任务。该模型在这项任务上达到了人类水平的表现，而且对于模型来说困难的问题对于两种文化的人来说也是困难的。此外，对模型的消融研究根据空间表示的差异提出了跨文化差异的解释。
