Handbook of Spatial Cognition

by Waller, David; Nadel, Lynn

• ISBN13: 9781433812040
• ISBN10: 1433812045
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-10-15
• Publisher: American Psychological Association

Summary

Spatial cognition is a branch of cognitive psychology that studies how people acquire and use knowledge about their environment to determine where they are, how to obtain resources, and how to find their way home. Researchers from a wide range of discipl

Author Biography

David Waller, PhD, is an associate professor of psychology at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His research seeks to understand all aspects of spatial functioning in people, including the ability to keep track of where things are in one's immediate environment, navigate between places, and remember spatial information. In addition to traditional laboratory experiments and correlational studies, his research has been at the leading edge of using real-time 3-D computer graphics as a tool for investigating environmental cognition.
 
Dr. Waller is cofounder and codirector of the world's largest immersive virtual environment facility (the HIVE) and is an associate editor for Memory & Cognition, the American Journal of Psychology, and Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments.
 
In his personal life, he is an ardent and zealous orienteer as well as a trail runner, pet owner, and gardener.
 
Lynn Nadel, PhD, is currently Regents Professor of Psychology and director of the Cognition and Neural Systems Program at the University of Arizona. His research, published in over 175 journal articles, chapters, and books, has been supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, National Science Foundation, Eunice Kennedy Schriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and several private foundations.
 
His work has focused on the functions of the hippocampus in memory and spatial cognition, leading to contributions in the study of stress and memory, sleep and memory, memory reconsolidation, and the mental retardation observed in Down syndrome. He has promulgated, with collaborators, two highly influential theories in cognitive neuroscience: the cognitive map theory of hippocampal function and the multiple trace theory of memory.
 
Dr. Nadel serves as the editor-in-chief of WIREs Interdisciplinary Reviews in Cognitive Science and is on the editorial boards of numerous journals in cognition and neural science. He was the corecipient in 2005 of the Grawemeyer Prize in Psychology, and he received the National Down Syndrome Society's Award for Research (2006).
 
He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Society of Experimental Psychologists.
 

Table of Contents

Contributors

Preface

Introduction: Frameworks for Understanding Spatial Thought (or Wrapping Our Heads Around Space) 
David Waller and Lynn Nadel

I. Neuroscientific Dimensions of Spatial Cognition

1. Hippocampus and Related Areas: What the Place Cell Literature Tells Us About Cognitive Maps in Rats and Humans 
   A. David Redish and Arne Ekstrom
2. Parietal Contributions to Spatial Cognition 
   Raymond P. Kesner and Sarah H. Creem-Regehr

II. Online Systems: Acquisition and Maintenance of Spatial Information

1. Spatial Perception and Action 
   Brett R. Fajen and Flip Phillips
2. Multisensory Contributions to Spatial Perception 
   Betty J. Mohler, Massimiliano Di Luca, and Heinrich H. Bülthoff
3. Perception of Spatial Relations During Self-Motion 
   John W. Philbeck and Jesse Sargent
4. Individual and Group Differences in Spatial Ability 
   Beth M. Casey

III. Offline Systems: Encoding, Storage, and Retrieval of Spatial Information

1. Spatial Memory: Place Learning, Piloting, and Route Knowledge 
   Ken Cheng and Paul Graham
2. Cognitive Maps 
   Lynn Nadel
3. Spatial Memory: Properties and Organization 
   Timothy P. McNamara
4. The Development of Location Coding: An Adaptive Combination Account 
   Mark P. Holden and Nora S. Newcombe
5. Models of Spatial Cognition 
   Stephen C. Hirtle

IV. Interpersonal Dimensions of Spatial Cognition

1. I Go Right, North, and Over: Processing Spatial Language 
   Holly A. Taylor and Tad T. Brunyé
2. Functions and Applications of Spatial Cognition 
   Daniel R. Montello and Martin Raubal
3. Wayfinding, Navigation, and Environmental Cognition From a Naturalist's Stance 
   Harry Heft

Index

About the Editors