Why do speakers mix perspectives?

Authors:
Barbara Tversky;Paul Lee;Scott Mainwaring
Affiliations:
Department of Psychology, Stanford University, USA;Department of Psychology, Stanford University, USA;Interval Research Corporation
Venue:
Spatial Cognition and Computation
Year:
1999

Citing 3
Cited 8

Selecting a reference frame

Spatial Cognition and Computation
Environmental reference systems for large-scale spaces

Spatial Cognition and Computation
Egocentric frames of reference used for the retrieval of survey knowledge learned by map and navigation

Spatial Cognition and Computation

Geometric structures of frames of reference and natural language semantics

Spatial Cognition and Computation
Spatial Reference Systems

Spatial Cognition and Computation
Spatial Frames of Reference Used in Identifying Direction of Movement: An Unexpected Turn

COSIT 2001 Proceedings of the International Conference on Spatial Information Theory: Foundations of Geographic Information Science
Perspective Use and Perspective Shift in Spatial Dialogue

Proceedings of the international conference on Spatial Cognition VI: Learning, Reasoning, and Talking about Space
Object Configuration Reconstruction from Descriptions using Relative and Intrinsic Reference Frames

Proceedings of the 2008 conference on ECAI 2008: 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Designing instructional graphics for surgical education

EuroIMSA '08 Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference on Internet and Multimedia Systems and Applications
Spatial relation model for object recognition in human-robot interaction

ICIC'09 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Emerging intelligent computing technology and applications
Aligning spatial perspective in route descriptions

SC'10 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Spatial cognition

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.01

Visualization

Abstract

Although considerations of discourse coherence and cognitive processing suggest that communicators should adopt consistent perspectives when describing spatial scenes, in many cases they switch perspectives. Ongoing research examining cognitive costs indicates that these are small and exacted in establishing a mental model of a scene but not in retrieving information from a well-known scene. A perspective entails a point of view, a referent object, and terms of reference. These may change within a perspective, exacting cognitive costs, so that the costs of switching perspective may not be greater than the costs of maintaining the same perspective. Another project investigating perspective choice for self and other demonstrates effects of salience of referent object and ease of terms of reference. Perspective is mixed not just in verbal communications but also in pictorial ones, suggesting that at times, switching perspective is more effective than maintaining a consistent one.