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Timothy P. McNamara is a psychologist currently serving as the Ginny and Conner Searcy Dean of the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University. He heads the Spatial Memory & Navigation Lab (MemNav Lab) [1]
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Timothy P. McNamara is a psychologist currently serving as the Ginny and Conner Searcy Dean of the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University. He heads the Spatial Memory & Navigation Lab (MemNav Lab) [1]
McNamara received his B.G.S. from the University of Kansas in 1979 and his Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University in 1984. His Ph.D. advisor was Robert Sternberg. He started his career as assistant professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University in 1983. He was promoted to associate professor in 1989 and to Professor in 1995. At Vanderbilt University, McNamara has served as Chair of the Department of Psychology (1996–2004, 2022–2023); Associate and Vice Provost (2004–2015); and Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Science (2023–2024). He has been involved in higher education accreditation, and served on the Board of Trustees of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges from 2014 to 2019.
McNamara's research [2] [3] investigates human memory, cognition, and decision making, with a particular focus on spatial processing. His research has investigated the metric structure of spatial memory, the spatial reference systems used in memory to represent the locations of objects in the environment, and how people update representations of their own location and orientation during locomotion. Recent studies have examined how people use spatial cues to location and orientation (e.g., landmarks in the environment and body-based cues, such as vestibular, proprioceptive, and efference-copy information) during navigation to estimate their positions and the locations of goals. These studies have used statistical decision theory as a theoretical framework for examining the complex sensory-perceptual and decision processes involved in navigation.
His highest cited paper is entitled "Mental representations of spatial relations." according to Google Scholar [4]
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Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."
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