For the last week and a half, I have traveled by plane, by car, by ferry, by kayak, by boat, and by foot, visiting many beautiful locations within the Pacific Northwest in the United States. Whether it is due to my middle-aged brain or the fact that there have just been so many places, I […]
Spatial Cognition
Close your eyes for a moment and think about the past year. Now imagine mapping out your plans for the upcoming year. If you had to point to a location that corresponds to “tomorrow” or “next month,” where would it be? What about “yesterday”? Chances are, next month is somewhere to the right of tomorrow. […]
Imagine A Paradise Every other year, students join my co-instructor and me on a research-oriented field study down to Roatán, Honduras, in collaboration with the Dolphin Communication Project and its director, Dr. Kathleen Dudzinski. During this field-based research course, students learn about dolphin biology and behavior, the conservation of coral and sea turtles, and the […]
How am I supposed to learn my way around this confusing new place? Picture the following situation: you’re on vacation, you’ve spent all day (and then some) in airports and on planes, and you’ve finally made it to your hotel. Now you’ve got to find your room, and you need to remember how to get […]
If you watched the Academy Award winning film, CODA (trailer below), you’ll appreciate that the character who played the son is a native signer. That is, he learned sign language from his parents from the start. How do we learn spatial relations? It’s a fundamental ability we pick up early. Much of what we know […]
“Second star to the right and straight on ’til morning.” ― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan Like Peter Pan, I’m a landmark kind-of-navigator and my navigation is spot on once I have a good idea of the space. As a 5-yr-old, I took my 3-yr-old brother on an adventure through the streets of our neighborhood from our […]
Imagine how you might measure someone’s spatial thinking skills – their ability to understand, manipulate, and reason about how objects interact in physical spaces. If you’re a psychologist, you probably immediately thought of Shepard and Metzler’s mental rotation task. In this task, participants are shown two illustrations and asked if the pictured objects are identical or […]
Humans have a sort Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde relationship with safety devices, such as helmets. For example, on the one hand bicycle helmets are known to reduce serious head injuries (by 70%, it turns out). On the other hand, helmets might also lead to more risky behavior. For instance, cyclists are often thought to ride faster […]
Search for “can women read maps?” and Google will reward you with more than 300,000,000 hits. I haven’t read them all but the first few hits are pretty clear in their verdict, namely that women cannot read maps. And the book, “Why men don’t listen and women can’t read maps” is likely at the top […]
Harvey, Irma, Jose, … and now Maria. Hurricanes have been wreaking havoc in the tropical and subtropical Atlantic for much of the past few months. Their power and consequences fueled by climate change, we can expect more hurricanes that are followed by the retirement of their names: When a named storm was particularly destructive and […]