Symbolic Systems Forum - Barbara Tversky, Psychology Department

Barbara Tversky, Psychology Department, "Spatial Thinking"

ABSTRACT:

How do people think about space?

People think about different spaces differently, depending on how they perceive them and how they interact with or in them. The space of the body

is composed of typically named body parts and their functions. The space around the body is organized by the three major axes of the body, and biased by their relative accessibility. The space of navigation is constructed out of landmarks and spatial relations among them; this organization leads to systematic errors in cognitive maps. Finally, the space of graphics is created by people to represent elements and relations that are spatial or metaphorically spatial for a number of ends: to augment memory, to facilitate information processing, to promote inferences and discoveries.

BIO:

Barbara Tversky studied cognitive psychology at the University of Michigan and taught at Hebrew University in Jerusalem before joining Stanford. Her general insterests are in spatial thinking and language, memory, event cognitive and perception, with specific interests in spatial mental models, cognitive maps, spatial and temporal descriptions, event perception, event narratives, graphic interfaces, diagrammatic reasoning, visual and verbal

explanations, visual narratives, design, cognitive design principles,cross-linguistic comparisons.