In the Spatial Thinking lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara, we are interested in spatial thinking very generally, from how people mentally represent the locations of objects in space and the location of the self in the environment to how people use spatial representations to think about non-spatial entities. We use a variety of methods in our research, including analysis of individual differences, eye tracking, fMRI and use of virtual environment technology as well as more traditional experimental methods in cognitive psychology.

If you are interested in pursuing a PhD degree in the lab, please contact Mary Hegarty (hegarty@psych.ucsb.edu).

Recent publications:

• Paper in Nature Neuroscience: How the brain keeps track of changing object locations during observer motion.
• Paper in press in Cognitive Science: Spatial reasoning with external visualizations: What matters is what you see, not whether you interact.
• Paper in Cognitive Science: Spatial visualization in physics problem solving.
• Paper in Intelligence: Spatial abilities at different scales: Individual differences in aptitude-test performance and spatial-layout learning.

Items of perennial interest:

• Santa Barbara Sense of Direction Scale

Upcoming conferences:

• Psychonomics 2008
• Cognitive Science 2009