Related Research Articles
Waldo Rudolph Tobler was an American-Swiss geographer and cartographer. Tobler's idea that "Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things" is referred to as the "first law of geography." He proposed a second law as well: "The phenomenon external to an area of interest affects what goes on inside". Tobler was an active Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara Department of Geography until his death.
David Cyril Geary is a United States cognitive developmental and evolutionary psychologist with interests in mathematical learning and sex differences. He is currently a Curators’ Professor and Thomas Jefferson Fellow in the Department of Psychological Sciences and Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri.
A cognitive map is a type of mental representation which serves an individual to acquire, code, store, recall, and decode information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in their everyday or metaphorical spatial environment. The concept was introduced by Edward Tolman in 1948. He tried to explain the behavior of rats that appeared to learn the spatial layout of a maze, and subsequently the concept was applied to other animals, including humans. The term was later generalized by some researchers, especially in the field of operations research, to refer to a kind of semantic network representing an individual's personal knowledge or schemas.
Environmental psychology is a branch of psychology that explores the relationship between humans and the external world. It examines the way in which the natural environment and our built environments shape us as individuals. Environmental Psychology emphasizes how humans change the environment and how the environment changes humans' experiences and behaviors. The field defines the term environment broadly, encompassing natural environments, social settings, built environments, learning environments, and informational environments. According to an article on APA Psychnet, environmental psychology is when a person thinks of a plan, travels to a certain place, and follows through with the plan throughout their behavior.
Michael Frank Goodchild is a British-American geographer. He is an Emeritus Professor of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After nineteen years at the University of Western Ontario, including three years as chair, he moved to Santa Barbara in 1988, as part of the establishment of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, which he directed for over 20 years. In 2008, he founded the UCSB Center for Spatial Studies.
Michael S. Gazzaniga is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the USA, where he heads the new SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind. He is one of the leading researchers in cognitive neuroscience, the study of the neural basis of mind. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Academy of Sciences.
Geovisualization or geovisualisation, also known as cartographic visualization, refers to a set of tools and techniques supporting the analysis of geospatial data through the use of interactive visualization.
Michael I. Posner is an American psychologist who is a researcher in the field of attention, and the editor of numerous cognitive and neuroscience compilations. He is emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, and an adjunct professor at the Weill Medical College in New York. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Posner as the 56th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Alan M. MacEachren is an American geographer, Professor of Geography and Director, GeoVISTA Center, Department of Geography, The Pennsylvania State University. He is known for his cross-disciplinary work in the fields of human-centered geographic visualization, scientific and information visualization, and in statistics.
Nora S. Newcombe is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology and the James H. Glackin Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Temple University. She is a Canadian-American researcher in cognitive development, cognitive psychology and cognitive science, and expert on the development of spatial thinking and reasoning and episodic memory. She was the principal investigator of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (2006-2018), one of six Science of Learning Centers funded by the National Science Foundation.
Reginald George Golledge was an Australian-born American Professor of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was named Faculty Research Lecturer for 2009. During his career he wrote or edited 16 books and 100 chapters for other books, and wrote more than 150 academic papers.
Arthur Paul Shimamura was a professor of psychology and faculty member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focused on the neural basis of human memory and cognition. He received his BA in experimental psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1977 and his PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Washington in 1982. He was a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Larry Squire, where he studied amnesic patients. In 1989, Shimamura began his professorship at UC Berkeley. He has published over 100 scientific articles and chapters, was a founding member of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and has been science advisor for the San Francisco Exploratorium science museum.
Spatial cognition is the acquisition, organization, utilization, and revision of knowledge about spatial environments. It is most about how animals including humans behave within space and the knowledge they built around it, rather than space itself. These capabilities enable individuals to manage basic and high-level cognitive tasks in everyday life. Numerous disciplines work together to understand spatial cognition in different species, especially in humans. Thereby, spatial cognition studies also have helped to link cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Scientists in both fields work together to figure out what role spatial cognition plays in the brain as well as to determine the surrounding neurobiological infrastructure.
Jonathan Smallwood is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Queen's University at Kingston in Ontario, Canada. His research uses the tools of cognitive neuroscience to investigate the process by which the brain self generates thoughts not arising from perception, such as during the experience of mind-wandering and daydreaming. For the last two years he has been recognised as one of the world's most highly cited scientists.
Jonathan Schooler, is an American psychologist and Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who researches various topics that intersect aspects of both cognitive psychology and philosophy such as: Belief in free will, Meta-awareness, Mindfulness, Mind-Wandering, Memory, Creativity, and Emotion. Schooler is also known for his sometimes controversial research on topics such as Anomalous Cognition and the decline effect.
Cognitive geography is an interdisciplinary study of cognitive science and geography. It aims to understand how humans view space, place, and environment. It involves formalizing factors that influence our spatial cognition to create a more effective representation of space. These improved models assist in a variety of issues, for example, the developing maps that communicate better, providing navigation instructions that are easier to follow, utilizing space more practically, accounting for the cultural differences on spatial thinking for more effective cross-cultural information exchange, and an overall increased understanding of our environment.
Sense of direction is the ability to know one's location and perform wayfinding. It is related to cognitive maps, spatial awareness, and spatial cognition. Sense of direction can be impaired by brain damage, such as in the case of topographical disorientation.
F. Gregory Ashby is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He is known for his work in mathematical psychology, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience.
Mary Hegarty is an Irish-American psychologist who is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research considers spatial thinking in complex processes. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
References
- ↑ Frank, Andrew U. "Qualitative spatial reasoning: Cardinal directions as an example." International Journal of Geographical Information Science 10.3 (1996): 269-290.
- ↑ Hegarty, Mary, et al. "Development of a self-report measure of environmental spatial ability." Intelligence 30.5 (2002): 425-447.
- 1 2 3 Daniel R. Montello, Academic Background at uscb.com. Accessed 8-4-2015.
