IN, OUT and Through: Formalising some dynamic aspects of the image schema CONTAINMENT

In the cognitive sciences, image schemas are considered to be the conceptual building blocks learned from sensorimotor processes in early infancy. They are used in language and higher levels of cognition as information skeletons. Despite the potential of integrating image schemas into formal systems to aid for instance commonsense reasoning, computational analogy and concept invention, formalisations of image schemas are sparse. In particular in respect to their dynamic nature. In this paper, we therefore describe how some of the dynamic aspects of the image schema CONTAINMENT can be formally approached using an image schema logic based on the Region Connection Calculus (RCC8), the Qualitative Trajectory Calculus (QTC), Ligozat's cardinal directions (CD), and Linear Temporal Logic over the reals (RTL), with 3D Euclidean space assumed for the spatial domain. The distinctions in our formalisations are motivated with concrete examples from natural language, derived from semi-automated image schema extraction, and illustrate that we target some of the essential distinctions regarding containers and movement.