During the past century, psychologists and educators have developed
over a hundred tests designed to measure differences between
individuals in spatial abilities. These tests have all been "paper-
and-pencil" tests constructed in "pictorial" space. They include such
tasks as finding hidden patterns, manipulating matrices, visualizing
reorientations of shapes and solving mazes.
In contrast to pictorial spatial abilities, there have been only a few
attempts to assess individual differences in larger-scale or
"environmental" spatial abilities. These abilities are involved in
tasks such as finding one's way in the environment and learning the
layout of a building or city. Attempts to measure individual
differences in environmental spatial abilities have not been very
successful. Moreover, environmental spatial abilities are only
weakly predicted by tests of pictorial spatial abilities. The purpose
of this research is to increase our understanding of individual
differences in environmental spatial abilities and to develop valid
and reliable measures of such abilities. This research will
contribute to a broad theory of the psychology of space, and is likely
to have practical application in such contexts as personnel
selection, education and training (notably, determining the validity
of simulations), and robotics.
These are some of the more specific questions that we are
addressing:
- Do spatial abilities differ as a function of the size of the
space involved?
- Do spatial abilities differ as a function of the extent to
which stimulus materials must be scanned and integrated over
time?
- Does the measurement of environmental spatial abilities
differ as a function of whether a person is imagining the
space being tested or is actually located in that space?
- Does the measurement of environmental spatial abilities
differ as a function of whether static or dynamic materials
are involved? This might be true in either of two ways:
(a) A test may be presented in a static or dynamic format
(e.g., drawings vs. computer animations).
(b) A test presented in a static format may or may not
require dynamic manipulation of spatial representations.
- What are people reporting on when they rate their own "sense-
of-direction"?
- What role do dead-reckoning and landmark learning abilities
play in environmental spatial abilities?
- How do geometric variations in pathway layout relate to the
difficulty of dead-reckoning performance?
- How do abilities at producing and comprehending verbally
described spatial information relate to environmental spatial
abilities?
- How does existing knowledge of local, national, and world
geography relate to environmental spatial abilities?
PROJECT
PERSONNEL:
DANIEL
R.
MONTELLO,
Department of Geography, P.I.
montello@geog.ucsb.edu
http://pollux.geog.ucsb.edu/~montello
Dan Montello has a B.A. in Psychology from The Johns Hopkins
University in
Baltimore,
and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Psychology (Environmental Psychology
emphasis)
from Arizona State University in Tempe (Ph.D. 1988). He was a
postdoc at
The Institute of Child Development, The University of Minnesota,
from 1988
until 1991. He was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Psychology
Department at North Dakota State University in Fargo during 1991-
92. He is
currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at
UC Santa
Barbara. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of
spatial
perception, cognition, and behavior; spatial aspects of social
behavior;
environmental psychology and behavioral geography.
MARY
HEGARTY,
Department of Psychology, P.I.
hegarty@psych.ucsb.edu
http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/~hegarty/
Mary Hegarty is an Associate Professor of Psychology. She was
educated at University College Dublin (B.A., M.A.) and Carnegie Mellon
University (Ph.D.). Mary is interested in both spatial and verbal
information processing as they relate to comprehension and
reasoning in scientific and mathematical domains. One current
research focus is the development of a theory of how people
construct dynamic mental models of mechanical devices from static
diagrams and texts accompanying these diagrams. In this research,
she uses eye-fixation data to trace the processes involved in
interpreting diagrams and text and integrating these two sources of
information. Mary's research is also concerned with the cognitive
analysis of individual differences. She studies individual
differences in basic information processing capacities (e.g., the
ability to transform visual images) and how these individual
differences affect more complex activities, such as navigation and
mechanical reasoning.
TONY
RICHARDSON,
Department of Geography, Graduate Researcher
tonyr@geog.ucsb.edu,
Tony has a B.A. in psychology from the University of California, San
Diego. He just completed his M.A., and is working towards his Ph.D.
in the Department of Geography, UCSB. Research interests include
spatial cognition, human navigation and spatial knowledge
acquisition through virtual environments.
KRISTIN
LOVELACE,
Department of Psychology, Graduate Researcher
lovelace@psych.ucsb.edu,
Kristin is a doctoral student in the department of Psychology at
UCSB, and has just finished her M.A. in Geography at UCSB. Kristin
received her M.S. from Cornell University, in Design and
Environmental Analysis, with an emphasis on Human-Environment
Relations. She also has a B.A. in theatre from the University of
Virginia. Her research interests focus on several areas within the
field of spatial cognition. The first deals with the specific
(physical and cultural) features of landmarks which make them
salient parts of our mental spatial representations. The second
concerns the interface between language and spatial representation:
how do we translate spatial knowledge into a verbal form? What
information may be lost in doing so? What do we know that we are
unable to communicate verbally? How do verbal skills interact with
spatial skills in the production of verbal navigational instructions
('directions')?
MIKE
PROVENZA,
Department of Psychology, Undergraduate Research Assistant
provenza@psych.ucsb.edu,
Mike recently finished his undergraduate studies in the Psychology
and Anthropology Departments at UCSB. His current interests
include spatial cognition and perception, and evolutionary
psychology.
