An investigation of spatial behavior in agile guidance tasks

Humans are capable of agile and adaptive spatial behaviors that are far beyond the capabilities of today´s autonomous systems. Spatial behaviors have been investigated in AI, cognitive science and neuroscience. This paper describes an engineering-oriented perspective that is intended to bridge the gap between these fields. We claim that spatial behavior cannot be fully understood by considering the agent and its environment separately. In our approach, we put the emphasis on the interaction between the agent´s dynamics and the task environment. We hypothesize that specific patterns emerge from this interaction and that these patterns are used by human operators to mitigate the complexity involved in agile and adaptive spatial performance. This paper describes preliminary experiments and a methodology to investigate these hypotheses.