Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Every day, we navigate our environments with astonishingease. Most of our paths are familiar to us and can benavigated without (much) conscious thought; in other cases,we use various strategies to find our way (Tenbrink &Wiener, 2007). Since these processes are at the heart ofhuman spatial cognition they have been researchedextensively, often based on route directions as the mostcommon verbalizations of navigation. Our research extendsthis tradition across various wayfinding contexts, addressingstreet network scenarios (Hölscher, Tenbrink, & Wiener,2011), complex buildings (Tenbrink, Bergmann, &Konieczny, 2011), alpine environments (Egorova, Tenbrink,& Purves, 2015), and including effects of automatic systemsas producers (Tenbrink & Winter, 2009) or recipients(Moratz & Tenbrink, 2006; Tenbrink et al., 2010) of spatialdirections. In all of these studies natural language data areused to address concepts of navigation, some of which areexpressed explicitly, while others remain implicit and onlyindirectly reflected through the ways in which speakers uselanguage in spatial navigation contexts.