Tyler Thrash

Saint Louis University | SLU · Department of Biology

INTRODUCTION: Alzheimer′s disease affects spatial abilities that are often overlooked in standard cognitive screening tools. We assessed whether the spatial navigation tasks in the Spatial Performance Assessment for Cognitive Evaluation (SPACE) can complement existing tools such as the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA). METHODS: 348 participants...

Gender differences in navigation performance are a recurrent and controversial topic. Previous research suggests that men outperform women in navigation tasks and that men and women exhibit different navigation strategies. Here, we investigate whether motivation to complete the task moderates the relationship between navigation performance and gend...

Digital maps on personal devices (e.g., phones) are common tools used to aid navigation. Different types of digital maps can influence spatial knowledge acquisition, and this effect might depend on whether the user interacts with an forward-up or north-up map. In spatial cognition theory, these differences can be used to support either sequential o...

Gender differences in navigation performance are a recurrent and controversial topic. Previous research suggests that men outperform women in navigation tasks and that men and women exhibit different navigation strategies. Here, we investigate whether motivation to complete the task moderates the relationship between navigation performance and gend...

Premise: With modern advances in genetic sequencing technology, plant phenotyping has become a substantial bottleneck in crop improvement programs. Traditionally, researchers have manually measured phenotypic traits to help determine genotype-phenotype relationships, but manual measurements can be time consuming and expensive. Recently, automated...

Smart Cities already surround us, and yet they are still incomprehensibly far from directly impacting everyday life. While current Smart Cities are often inaccessible, the experience of everyday citizens may be enhanced with a combination of the emerging technologies Digital Twins (DTs) and Situated Analytics. DTs represent their Physical Twin (PT)...

Understanding the human factors governing effective information exchange is increasingly indispensable for the design of day to day human-computer systems. Moreover, effective information exchange becomes a matter of life or death during emergency egress. The complexity of an unknown environment and the unpredictable locations of hazards often prev...

Smart Cities already surround us, and yet they are still incomprehensibly far from directly impacting everyday life. While current Smart Cities are often inaccessible, the experience of everyday citizens may be enhanced with a combination of the emerging technologies Digital Twins (DTs) and Situated Analytics. DTs represent their Physical Twin (PT)...

Sensors have become ubiquitous in buildings but are rarely connected to a network, and their potential to analyse the performance, use, and interaction with a building is not yet fully realised. In the coming years, we expect sensors in buildings to become part of the Internet of Things (IoT) and grow in numbers to form a Dense Indoor Sensor Networ...

Human path-planning operates differently from deterministic AI-based path-planning algorithms due to the decay and distortion in a human's spatial memory and the lack of complete scene knowledge. Here, we present a cognitive model of path-planning that simulates human-like learning of unfamiliar environments, supports systematic degradation in spat...

In the event of fires and other hazards, visual guidance systems that support evacuation are critical for the safety of individuals. Current visual guidances for evacuations are typically non-adaptive signs in that they always indicate the same exit route independently of the hazard’s location. Adaptive signage systems can facilitate wayfinding dur...

Embodied interfaces are promising for virtual reality (VR) because they can improve immersion and reduce simulator sickness compared to more traditional handheld interfaces (e.g., gamepads). We present a novel embodied interface called the Limbic Chair. The chair is composed of two separate shells that allow the user’s legs to move independently wh...

Visibility is the degree to which different parts of the environment can be observed from a given vantage point. In the absence of previous familiarity or signage, the visibility of key elements in a multilevel environment (e.g., the entrance, exit, or the destination itself) becomes a primary input to make wayfinding decisions and avoid getting lo...

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated great success in solving navigation tasks but often fails when learning complex environmental structures. One open challenge is to incorporate low-level generalizable skills with human-like adaptive path-planning in an RL framework. Motivated by neural findings in animal navigation, we propose a Successo...

Recent advances in Augmented Reality (AR), the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and Digital Twins transform the types, rates, and volume of information generated in buildings as well as the mediums through which they can be perceived by users. These advances push the standard approach of media architecture to embed screens in the built en...

The talk was given in the Best Paper Candidate session at 11:30am CET on the 24th of March 2021 at the 19th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom 2021) in Kassel, Germany. This version of the talk was pre-recorded as a backup by the author. The teaser summarized the paper in one minute and has been circulat...

Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) has been advanced as an alternative for creating indoor sensor networks that extends beyond its original long-distance communication purpose. For the present paper, we developed a Dense Indoor Sensor Network (DISN) with 390 sensor nodes and three gateways and empirically evaluated its performance for half a y...

We present a large data of indoor Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) network metadata to study Dense Indoor Sensor Networks (DISN). We collected 14 million transmissions from 390 sensors between date February 2020 and date September 2020. The transmissions have been received by 3 gateways across 8 floors and distances up to 64 m. The prototype...

The talk was given in the Best Paper Candidate session at 11:30am CET on the 24th of March 2021 at the 19th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom 2021) in Kassel, Germany. This version of the talk was pre-recorded as a backup by the author. The teaser summarized the paper in one minute and has been circulat...

Signage systems are critical for communicating spatial information during wayfinding among a plethora of noise in the environment. A proper signage system can improve wayfinding performance and user experience by reducing the perceived complexity of the environment. However, previous models of sign-based wayfinding do not incorporate realistic nois...

Renewable energy systems (RES) can impact landscape aesthetics and influence the public's perception of the landscape and their acceptance of large infrastructure projects. Perceptual processes have consequences for both physiological and behavioral reactions to visual landscape changes and have not been systematically assessed in the context of RE...

Dense crowds in public spaces have often caused serious security issues at large events. In this paper, we study the 2010 Love Parade disaster, for which a large amount of data (e.g. research papers, professional reports and video footage) exist. We reproduce the Love Parade disaster in a three-dimensional computer simulation calibrated with data f...

A carefully designed map can reduce pedestrians’ cognitive load during wayfinding and may be an especially useful navigation aid in crowded public environments. In the present paper, we report three studies that investigated the effects of map complexity and crowd movement on wayfinding time, accuracy and hesitation using both online and laboratory...

Despite much recent interest, it is unclear which types of landmarks are best suited for survey knowledge acquisition. Thus, we investigated the accuracy of survey knowledge after the learning of sequentially visible (local) landmarks and simultaneously visible (global) landmarks from a first-person perspective during navigation through a virtual c...

Landmarks play a vital role in human wayfinding by providing the structure for mental spatial representations and indicating locations with which to orient. Less research effort has been allocated towards automated landmark identification in indoor environments despite a growing interest in indoor navigation in the scientific community. In this pap...

Agent-based modelling (ABM) can be used as a computational tool to model human routing behaviour, and offers particular promise when combined with insights from cognitive science. In this paper, we introduce typical errors into the encoding of the agents mental representation of the environment. This method deviates from the classical computer scie...

The influence of stress states on cognition is widely recognized. However, the manner in which stress affects survey knowledge acquisition is still unresolved. For the present study, we investigated whether survey knowledge acquisition during a stressful task (i.e., under time pressure) is more accurate for the mental representation of global or lo...

With the development of modern geovisual analytics tools, several researchers have emphasized the importance of understanding users' cognitive, perceptual, and affective tendencies for supporting spatial decisions with geographic information displays (GIDs). However, most recent technological developments have focused on support for navigation in t...

With the development of modern geovisual analytics tools, several researchers have emphasized the importance of understanding users’ cognitive, perceptual, and affective tendencies for supporting spatial decisions with geographic information displays (GIDs). However, most recent technological developments have focused on support for navigation in t...

Agent-based modelling (ABM) can be used as a computational tool to model human routing behaviour, and offers particular promise when combined with insights from cognitive science. In this paper, we introduce typical errors into the encoding of the agents mental representation of the environment. This method deviates from the classical computer scie...

Virtual reality (VR) experiments are increasingly employed because of their internal and external validity compared to real-world observation and laboratory experiments, respectively. VR is especially useful for geographic visualizations and investigations of spatial behavior. In spatial behavior research, VR provides a platform for studying the re...

Investigating the interactions among multiple participants is a challenge for researchers from various disciplines, including the decision sciences and spatial cognition. With a local area network and dedicated software platform, experimenters can efficiently monitor the behavior of the participants that are simultaneously immersed in a desktop vir...

A head-mounted display, a stationary control bar, and a limbic chair allow for a user to pilot a hang-glider in VR.

The collective behavior of human crowds often exhibits surprisingly regular patterns of movement. These patterns stem from social interactions between pedestrians such as when individuals imitate others, follow their neighbors, avoid collisions with other pedestrians, or push each other. While some of these patterns are beneficial and promote effic...

Cognitive neuroscience can provide novel and interesting techniques for investigating spatial and geographic thinking. However, the incorporation of neuroscientific methods still lacks the theoretical motivation necessary for the progression of geography as a discipline. Rather than reflecting a shortcoming of neuroscience, this weakness has develo...

Previous research in spatial cognition has often relied on simple spatial tasks in static environments in order to draw inferences regarding navigation performance. These tasks are typically divided into categories (e.g., egocentric or allocentric) that reflect different two-systems theories. Unfortunately, this two-systems approach has been insuff...

R script for correlation/loading visualisation. Short script to visualise the factor loadings and correlation matrix based on the design used by [74] and adapted for our purpose. Detailed instructions on how to create such a visualisation can be found at http://rpubs.com/danmirman/plotting_factor_analysis. (R)

Instructions for participants. Text handed out to the participants before the experiment. (ODT)

Database export. Export of the participant data, ready for loading into Matlab. (MAT)

Affective states have been found to influence peoples abilities to orient in and to mentally represent large scale spaces. For example, navigators can become stressed when searching for destinations in unfamiliar environments. How then is spatial knowledge acquisition influenced by navigators stress state during assisted wayfinding? We report an on...

Signage systems are critical for communicating environmental information. Signage that is visible and properly located can assist individuals in making efficient navigation decisions during wayfinding. Drawing upon concepts from information theory, we propose a framework to quantify the wayfinding information available in a virtual environment. Tow...

Previous research in spatial cognition has often relied on simple spatial tasks in staticenvironments in order to draw inferences regarding navigation performance. These tasksare typically divided into categories (e.g., egocentric or allocentric) that reflect differenttwo-systems theories. Unfortunately, this two-systems approach has been insuffici...

Understanding the collective dynamics of crowd movements during stressful emergency situations is central to reducing the risk of deadly crowd disasters. Yet, their systematic experimental study remains a challenging open problem due to ethical and methodological constraints. In this paper, we demonstrate the viability of shared 3D virtual environm...

Symposium S2: Spatial Representation and Processing – What Information Do We Need?

Understanding the collective dynamics of crowd movements during stressful emergency situations is central to reducing the risk of deadly crowd disasters. Yet, their systematic experimental study remains a challenging open problem due to ethical and methodological constraints. In this paper, we demonstrate the viability of shared 3D virtual environm...

Tracking and analyzing the movement trajectories of individuals and groups is an important problem with applications in crowd management and the development of transportation systems. However, real-world tracking is limited due to the size of the trackable area and the precision with which a person can be tracked. Experiments in virtual environment...

Understanding the collective dynamics of crowd movements during stressful emergency situations is central to reducing the risk of deadly crowd disasters. Yet, their systematic experimental study remains a challenging open problem due to ethical and methodological constraints. In this paper, we demonstrate the viability of shared three-dimensional v...

Understanding the collective dynamics of crowd movements during stressful emergency situations is central to reducing the risk of deadly crowd disasters. Yet, their systematic experimental study remains a challenging open problem due to ethical and methodological constraints. In this paper, we demonstrate the viability of shared three-dimensional v...

Spatial navigation in the absence of vision has been investigated from a variety of perspectives and disciplines. These different approaches have progressed our understanding of spatial knowledge acquisition by blind individuals, including their abilities, strategies, and corresponding mental representations. In this review, we propose a framework...

Virtual reality (VR) allows for highly-detailed observations, accurate behavior measurements, and systematic environmental manipulations under controlled laboratory circumstances. It therefore has the potential to be a valuable research tool for studies in human-environment interaction, such as building usability studies and post- as well as pre-oc...

Humans engage in wayfinding many times a day. We try to find our way in urban environments when walking towards our work places or when visiting a city as tourists. In order to reach the targeted destination, we have to make a series of wayfinding decisions of varying complexity. Previous research has focused on classifying the complexity of these...

A major issue with virtual reality (VR) studies in spatial cognition is the dissociation of spatial ability from the capacity to use human interface devices (HID) such as joystick/gamepad and mouse. Previous research has found large individual differences in spatial navigation in both real and virtual worlds (Wolbers & Hegarty, 2010; Ishikawa & Mon...

Redirected walking algorithms imperceptibly rotate a virtual scene about users of immersive virtual environment systems in order to guide them away from tracking area boundaries. Ideally, these distortions permit users to explore large unbounded virtual worlds while walking naturally within a physically limited space. Many potential virtual worlds...

We investigated the interpolation of missing values in data that were fit by bidimensional regression models. This addresses a problem in spatial cognition research in which sketch maps are used to assess the veracity of spatial representations. In several simulations, we compared samples of different sizes with different numbers of interpolated co...

Eye fixations are periods of relative stability derived from continuous eye position (or eye movement) data. In order to define eye fixations, researchers often assume that the eye(s) will not move beyond a particular spatiotemporal window (i.e., a spatial area towards which the eye is directed within a particular period of time). However, exact sp...

We examined whether view combination mechanisms shown to underlie object and scene recognition can integrate visual information across views that have little or no three-dimensional information at either the object or scene level. In three experiments, people learned four "views" of a two dimensional visual array derived from a three-dimensional sc...