Human Linguistic Perception of Distances for Location-Aware Systems

Abstract

Location referencing relative to landmarks or between two points of interest is often presented by navigation systems (e.g., GPS, Google Maps) in quantitative terms (e.g., 100m, 2km, etc.). However, humans refer to distances between points of interests in linguistic forms, such as very close, far, almost there, nearby, etc. When location information is presented to humans in quantitative terms, they often reprocess the quantities into linguistic terms and articulate it in linguistic labels because quantitative articulations are not directly in line with the natural human cognition. Therefore, this research seeks to evaluate the possibility of applying perceptive computing to reprocess quantitative location references from landmarks or two points of interest into linguistic labels easily understood by humans. A comparative analysis between the perception of quantitative distances and similar physical distances in an environment familiar to the subjects has been carried out, and there is a clear disparity between the perceptions in these two contexts.