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.

Prospective Graduate Students: I am interested in accepting one or two new students in 2011. I invite you to browse the lab website to discover the range of questions that we study and if you are interested in pursuing a PhD degree in the lab, please email me (hegarty@psych.ucsb.edu) and apply to the program in Cognition, Perception and Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology.

News: Congratulations to Andy Stull, Postdoc in the Spatial Thinking Lab, who has received a National Academy of Education/Spencer Fellowship for 2010-2011.

Selected Recent Publications:

• Paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. What Determines our navigation abilities?
• Paper in The Psychology of Learning and Motivation. Components of Spatial Intelligence.
• Paper in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition. Thinking about the weather: how display salience and knowledge affect performance in a graphic inference task
  
• Paper in Nature Neuroscience: How the brain keeps track of changing object locations during observer motion.
• Paper in Cognitive Science: Spatial reasoning with external visualizations: What matters is what you see, not whether you interact.

Links:

• Rate your Spatial Thinking abilities
• Spatial@UCSB
• Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC)

Upcoming conferences:

• Diagrams 2010
• Cognitive Science 2010
• Spatial Cognition 2010