Foresight: a new approach based on the Z-number cognitive map

Foresight has recently emerged as one of the most attractive and practical fields of study, while being used to draw up a preferable future and formulate appropriate strategies for achieving predetermined goals. The present research aimed at providing a framework for foresight with a primary focus on the role of a cognitive approach and its combination with the concept of fuzzy cognitive map in the environments of uncertainty and ambiguity. The proposed framework consisted of the 3 phases: pre-foresight, foresight, and post-foresight. The main stage (foresight) focused on the role of imagination and intuition in drawing the future in the experts’ minds and depicting their perceptions above perceptions in the form of a fuzzy cognitive map influenced by variables related to the subject under study in order to determine a preferable future. The use of a Z-number concept and integrating it with fuzzy cognitive maps in the foresight-oriented decision-making space, which was mainly saturated with uncertainty and ambiguity, was one of the main strengths of the proposed framework in the current investigation. The present paper focused primarily on the evolution of expert’s knowledge with regard to the topic of foresight. The role of Z-number in various processes, from data collection to illustration, analysis, and aggregation of cognitive maps, was considered for gaining knowledge and understanding into the nature of future. Moreover, an ultimate objective was realized through identifying, aggregating, and selecting the variables from each expert’s perspective and then the relationship between each variable was determined in the main stage of foresight. Finally, the proposed framework was presented and explicated in the form of a case study, which revealed satisfactory results.

Evaluating the legibility of urban parks based on neuroscience and the FVFL model

PurposeThe purpose of the study is to quantitatively evaluate the role of landscape values and factors in urban parks experimentally based on neuroscience.Design/methodology/approachIn the first step, ten major parks were selected out of 59 regional and trans-regional parks in Tehran for field study analysis. Next, considering the diversity and abundance of landscape elements in the selected parks, Mellat Park was chosen for the case study.FindingsThe fixation duration of the factors has an average correlation coefficient of 0.5865, −0.5035 and −0.5125 for the overall sketch map, quality and accuracy, respectively. The results indicated that the “quality of people's cognitive maps” has a direct relation to fixation duration on “human-made factors” and an inverse relation to fixation duration on “natural factors” and “human activities and behavioral factors” in the park.Practical implicationsThe results can pave the way for further research in the interdisciplinary fields of landscape architecture and neuroscience.Originality/valueLegibility is a superior quality of urban spaces that profoundly affect how people perceive and behave.

The Importance of the Journey Map in the Design of a Playful Interactive-Interface

This article presents the importance of using the customer journey map (CJM) as a tool for managing new information technologies. The case study presents the use of the CJM to indicate the experiences that people have when using a playful interactive-interface, where the causal relationship between the brightness and the distance of the stars is visualized. The CJM is the result of a quantitative and qualitative study about user experience (UX) or UX research. Where you can use: 1) observation techniques, 2) interviews, 3) questionnaires, 4) a review of the domain literature about the phenomenon, archetypal descriptions, 5) diagrams of mental models; also known as thought schemes, or cognitive maps, among others. This research focuses the development of the interface in the design of archetypal profiles and mental models to generate the CJM, in the domain of the specific phenomenon.

Composed Cognitive Maps

Composed cognitive maps are a tool based on grounded theory and on Lynch's urban model of cognitive maps, which allow the transfer of information from ethnographic situations to general patterns, and to the so-called spatial dynamics. In criminological matters, they have been applied in the context of environmental and criminology of place to identify criminal situations, criminal patterns, and spatial dynamics of crime. The latter concept has allowed reliable diagnoses for the design of criminal policies. Their advantages are compared with traditional criminometric methods. It introduces a brief compilation of the existing literature on the subject. In a special way, this chapter shows how composed cognitive maps allowed the measurement of drug trafficking networks, police intelligence, and, above all, crime reduction.

The neuroecology of the water-to-land transition and the evolution of the vertebrate brain

The water-to-land transition in vertebrate evolution offers an unusual opportunity to consider computational affordances of a new ecology for the brain. All sensory modalities are changed, particularly a greatly enlarged visual sensorium owing to air versus water as a medium, and expanded by mobile eyes and neck. The multiplication of limbs, as evolved to exploit aspects of life on land, is a comparable computational challenge. As the total mass of living organisms on land is a hundredfold larger than the mass underwater, computational improvements promise great rewards. In water, the midbrain tectum coordinates approach/avoid decisions, contextualized by water flow and by the animal’s body state and learning. On land, the relative motions of sensory surfaces and effectors must be resolved, adding on computational architectures from the dorsal pallium, such as the parietal cortex. For the large-brained and long-living denizens of land, making the right decision when the wrong one means death may be the basis of planning, which allows animals to learn from hypothetical experience before enactment. Integration of value-weighted, memorized panoramas in basal ganglia/frontal cortex circuitry, with allocentric cognitive maps of the hippocampus and its associated cortices becomes a cognitive habit-to-plan transition as substantial as the change in ecology. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Systems neuroscience through the lens of evolutionary theory’.

The hippocampal formation and action at a distance

The question of why our conceptions of space and time are intertwined with memory in the hippocampal formation is at the forefront of much current theorizing about this brain system. In this article I argue that animals bridge spatial and temporal gaps through the creation of internal models that allow them to act on the basis of things that exist in a distant place and/or existed at a different time. The hippocampal formation plays a critical role in these processes by stitching together spatiotemporally disparate entities and events. It does this by 1) constructing cognitive maps that represent extended spatial contexts, incorporating and linking aspects of an environment that may never have been experienced together; 2) creating neural trajectories that link the parts of an event, whether they occur in close temporal proximity or not, enabling the construction of event representations even when elements of that event were experienced at quite different times; and 3) using these maps and trajectories to simulate possible futures. As a function of these hippocampally driven processes, our subjective sense of both space and time are interwoven constructions of the mind, much as the philosopher Immanuel Kant postulated.

Rozmyte mapy kognitywne jako technika prowadzenia ustrukturyzowanej analizy systemowej w obszarze nauk o bezpieczeństwie

Fuzzy Cognitive Maps as a Technique for Conducting Structured Systems Analysis in the Area of Security Sciences The article aims to present and introduce the main assumptions and procedures for creating fuzzy cognitive maps (FCM) in the field of security studies. FCM are a tool for conducting a systematic analysis of phenomena with a complex structure and consisting of many interrelated elements. The text was divided into three main parts devoted accordingly to theoretical premises of the FCM (the system analysis, mental and cognitive maps), the FCM itself, and the procedure for creating and using RMK for analytical purposes.