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Cognitive Space and Spatial Cognition: The SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition

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Abstract

Space and time are two of the most fundamental categories any human, animal, or other cognitive agent such as an autonomous robot has to deal with. They need to perceive their environments, make sense of their perceptions, and make interactions as embodied entities with other agents and their environment. The theoretical foundations and practical implications have been investigated from a cognitive perspective (i.e., from an information processing point of view) within the Sonderforschungsbereich/Transregio SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition (http://www.sfbtr8.spatial-cognition.de) over the past 12 years jointly by the Universities of Bremen and Freiburg. The research covered fundamental questions: what are the specific requirements of reasoning about space and time, for acting in space, and for any form of interaction including communication in spatio-temporal domains? It has been a success story in all research lines from foundational research to applications of spatial cognition in robotics, interaction and communication. The SFB/TR 8 actually shaped a new research field by extending a previous subfield of cognitive science with its own interdisciplinary techniques.

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  1. www.sfb-trr-62.de/.

  2. http://archives.caltech.edu/pictures/1.10-29.jpg.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the SFB/TR 8 through the German Research Foundation (DFG). This work has also been partially supported by a DFG Heisenberg-Fellowship (grant no. RA 1934/3-1).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Group Foundations of Artificial Intelligence, Institut für Informatik, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Georges-Köhler-Allee 52, 79110, Freiburg, Germany

    Marco Ragni & Bernhard Nebel

  2. Cognitive Systems, Universität Bremen, P.O. Box 330 440, 28334, Bremen, Germany

    Thomas Barkowsky & Christian Freksa

Authors
  1. Marco Ragni
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  2. Thomas Barkowsky
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  3. Bernhard Nebel
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  4. Christian Freksa
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Correspondence to Marco Ragni.

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Ragni, M., Barkowsky, T., Nebel, B. et al. Cognitive Space and Spatial Cognition: The SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition. Künstl Intell 30, 83–88 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13218-015-0404-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13218-015-0404-x

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